Bottled Water Consumption Grows in US Despite Recession, Education Efforts.

by Nancy Roberts

 

 

Sales of bottled water in the U.S. rose 4.1 percent to 9.1 billion gallons in 2011, an all-time high, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation‘s annual survey. Despite numerous campaigns and education efforts, U.S. per capita consumption of bottled water has risen by 60 percent in the last 10 years, from 18.2 to 29.2 gallons per person. In 1976, Americans consumed 1.6 gallons of bottled water per person. While domestic non-sparkling water made up the vast majority of sales, even sales of imported water, which had seen precipitous drops during the recession years of 2008-10, inched up in 2011.

The increase comes in spite of years of efforts by activists to draw attention to the financial and environmental costs of the bottled beverage, countering industry efforts to tempt consumers to drink the bottled stuff.

How can we convince more people to use less bottled water?

Some jurisdictions are trying laws to ban the bottle, including:

• National Parks: bottled water sales were banned this year in Grand Canyon National Park and Saguaro National Park
• Towns: Citizens of Concord, Massachusetts have been fighting for years to ban the bottled beverage.
• Universities: Some 90 in the U.S., including the University of Vermont, Loyola University in Chicago, and Humboldt State University in California.
• Public events: Bottled water will not be sold at next year’s America’s Cup race, or any other large public event, thanks to the Zero Waste policy of the San Francisco Port Commission.

What’s wrong with bottled water?

Some time in the future, people will look back in astonishment, wondering why millions of people shelled out so much money for a substance that could be had for mere pennies, while the bottles pollute waterways and take immense resources to produce and transport. (Did you know it takes three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water? With all that, bottled water is not even safer to drink than readily available tap water.

It all gets recycled, right?

Wrong. While the amount of plastic bottles recycled has grown, the recycling rate has remained steady, at about 27 percent.

Time and again we have seen that purely educational efforts are not enough, as convenience and cultural norms win out over logic and information. Change needs to come from within and from the people around us, working to make a behavior unacceptable. Everyone, from celebrities to teachers to neighbors and family members can influence others and lead by example, every day. How can we make that cool, refreshing bottle…uncool?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/bottled-water-consumption-grows-in-us-despite-recession-education-efforts.html#ixzz1wMF1DMJq

The Last Diet You Will Ever Need.

By:Mark Hyman, MD

Why is it that we believe we can feed our bodies industrial, nutrient-depleted food-like substances empty of life and be healthy? How did we come to believe that food industry chemicals and processing could replace nature-made foods?

A hundred years ago all food was organic, local, seasonal, fresh or naturally-preserved by ancient methods. All food was food. Now less than 3 percent of our agricultural land is used to grow fruits and vegetables, which should make up 80 percent of our diet. Today there are not even enough fruits and vegetables in this country to allow all Americans to follow the government guidelines to eat five to nine servings a day.

What most of us are left with is industrial food. And who knows what lurks in the average boxed, packaged, or canned factory-made science project.

When a French fry has more than 20 ingredients and almost all of them are not potato, or when a fast food hamburger contains very little meat, or when the average teenager consumes 34 teaspoons of sugar a day, we are living in a food nightmare, a sci-fi horror show.

The very fact that we are having a national conversation about what we should eat, that we are struggling with the question about what the best diet is, is symptomatic of how far we have strayed from the natural conditions that gave rise to our species, from the simple act of eating real, whole, fresh food. When it becomes a revolutionary act to eat real food, we are in trouble.

The food industry, which is the second biggest employer in America after the federal government, heavily influences the media and government agencies that regulate it (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration and Congress) and intentionally confuses and confounds us.

Low-fat is good -- so anything with a "low-fat" on the label must be healthy. But Coke is 100 percent fat-free and that doesn't make it a health food. Now we are told to eat more whole grains, so a few flecks of whole grains are sprinkled on sugary cereals. That doesn't make them a health food either.
The best advice is to avoid foods with health claims on the label, or better yet avoid foods with labels in the first place.

In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry. The food-like substances proffered by the industrial food system food trick our taste buds into momentary pleasure, but not our biology, which reacts, rejects and reviles the junk plied on our genes and our hormonal and biochemical pathways. We need to unjunk our biology.

Industrial processing has given rise to an array of addictive, fattening, metabolism-jamming chemicals and compounds including aspartame, MSG (monosodium glutamate), high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats, to name the biggest offenders.

MSG is used to create fat mice so researchers can study obesity. MSG is an excito-toxin that stimulates your brain to eat uncontrollably. When fed to mice, they pig out and get fat. It is in 80 percent of processed foods and mostly disguised as "natural flavorings."

And trans fat, for example, is derived from a real food -- vegetable oil -- chemically altered to resist degradation by bacteria, which is why modern cookies last on the shelf for years.

But the ancient energy system of your cells is descended from bacteria and those energy factories, or mitochondria, cannot process these trans fats either. Your metabolism is blocked and weight gain and Type 2 diabetes ensue.

Your tongue can be fooled and your brain can become addicted to the slick combinations of fat, sugar, and salt pumped into factory-made foods, but your biochemistry cannot, and the result is the disaster of obesity and chronic disease we have in America today.

No wonder 68 percent of Americans are overweight. No wonder that from 1960 to today obesity rates have risen from 13 percent to 36 percent and soon will reach 42 percent. Over the last decade the rate of pre-diabetes or diabetes in teenagers has risen from 9 percent to 23 percent.

Really? Almost one in four of our kids now has pre-diabetes or Type 2 diabetes? And 37 percent of normal weight kids have one or more cardiovascular risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol or high blood sugar, because even though factory food doesn't make them fat, it makes them sick!

It is time to take our kitchens and our homes back. Transforming the food industry seems monumental, a gigantic undertaking. But it is not. It is a small problem. In the small places in our lives, our shopping carts, the fridge, the cupboard, the kitchen and on our dining room table is where all the power is.

It is the hundreds of little choices, the small actions you make every day, that will topple the monolithic food industry. This century is littered with the bodies and institutions of fallen despots and despotic regimes -- from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Arab spring. There is no force more powerful than a small group of individuals with a desire to end injustice and abuse.
A very simple idea can break through the confusion and plant the seeds of a revolution. Our bodies were designed to run on real food. Our natural default state is health. We need to simplify our way of eating.

Unjunk our diet, detoxify our bodies and our minds and we heal. Simply choose foods such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, healthy oils (olive oil, fish oil, avocado and coconut oil), small amounts of whole grains and beans and lean animal protein including small wild fish, grass fed meat, and farm eggs.

There are no diets, no calorie counting, and no measuring fats, carbs or protein grams. None of that matters if you choose real, whole, fresh, live foods. If you choose quality, the rest takes care of itself.
When you eat empty industrial food with addictive chemicals and sugar, your body craves more, looking for nutrients in a dead food where none are to be found. Yet after eating nutrient dense fresh food for a few days the biological addiction to industrial food is broken, and in a few more days your cells begin to rejuvenate and you heal from the inside out.

And the side effects are all good ones: effortless weight loss, reversal of high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, clearing of brain fog, lifting of depression and fatigue and even better skin, hair and nails.

What is more important than what you take out of your diet is what you put in. Add in the good stuff and there won't be room for the bad. Mother Nature is the best pharmacist and food is the most powerful drug on the planet. It works faster, better and cheaper than any other pharmaceutical.
Whole, real food spiced up with a few super foods such as chia, hemp, parsley, cilantro, coconut and green juicing can beneficially affect thousands of genes, regulate dozens of hormones, and enhance the function of tens of thousands of protein networks.

Dinner is a date with the doctor. What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful than anything you will ever find at the bottom of a prescription bottle. The roadmap to health is simple: eat real food, practice self-love rather than self-loathing, imagine yourself well, get sufficient sleep, and incorporate movement into your life. The solution to our health crisis and obesity epidemic is not complicated.

Health and happiness are often just a few days away. Each of us has the capacity to make the small changes in our lives that will create big changes in our food landscape, our agriculture and even our government policies.

I hope you will use the power of your fork to be part of the start of a true food revolution.

Now I'd like to hear from you...

Have you changed your eating habits to include more real food?

What have you done to create a healthier diet for your family?

Have you eliminated MSG from your diet?

To your good health,
Mark Hyman, M.D.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark Hyman, M.D. is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine.

How Phantom Accounting Is Destroying the Post Office.

AlterNet / ByDavid Morris

The massive post office deficit that is driving management to commit institutional suicide is make-believe.

 

 

 

Every 6-year-old soon learns that there is real, and there is make-believe. The massive post office deficit that is driving management to commit institutional suicide by ending six-day delivery, closing half of the nation's 30,000 or so post offices and half its 500 mail-processing centers, and laying off more than 200,000 workers, is make-believe.


Here's why: In 1969, the federal government changed the way it did accounting. It began to use what is called a unified budget that includes trust funds such as Social Security previously considered off-budget because they were self-sustaining through dedicated revenue. At that time the post office was, as it had been since 1792, a department of the federal government like the Department of Energy or the Department of Agriculture. While generating most of its revenue from postage it also received significant congressional appropriations.


In 1970, Congress transformed the post office into the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). The new quasi-public agency was intended to put the postal office on a more business-like footing. The Postal Service was allowed to borrow to make needed capital investments and was given more flexibility in how it spent its money. In return, Congress required the USPS to become self-sufficient. The subsidy, at that time running about 15 percent of total revenues (close to $10 billion a year in 2012) was phased out over the next 15 years. After the mid-1980s the only taxpayer funds involved, amounting today to $100 million a year, subsidizes mail for the blind and official mail to overseas voters.


In keeping with the new philosophy that the Postal Service should be independent, Nixon's Office of Management and Budget administratively moved its finances off budget in 1974. In 1989 Congress did it by statute.


None of this made any difference, as exhaustively detailed by the USPS Inspector General in a 2009 report. The OMB and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) continued to treat the Postal Service as part of the unified budget, the budget they use for "scoring" legislation to estimate its impact on the deficit.


And that's where the make-believe comes from.


In 2001, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) put the Postal Service on its list of "high-risk" programs because of rising financial pressures resulting from exploding demand from both the residential and commercial sectors. A year later the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) found the Postal Service had been significantly overpaying into its retirement fund. It seemed a simple matter to reduce future payments and tap into the existing surplus to pay for current expenses.
And that's when make believe began to have a tragic real-world impact.


In late 2002, the CBO announced that a change in the retirement contribution formula could increase unified budget deficits by as much as $41 billion, about $3.5 billion a year. If the overpayments were used to delay future rate increases, the CBO added, future government receipts would decline, adding to the unified budget deficit.


To overcome the budget scoring objections, Congress began what in retrospect we can see was little more than an exercise in rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. The final law allowed the Postal Service to use its overpayments to pay off its debt and delay increasing rates for three years. After that, any overpayments were to be collected in an escrow fund that would be unavailable to the post office until Congress determined how the funds would be used. And then came the quid pro quo. The Postal Service became responsible for paying postal workers for the time they spent in prior military service. Up until then, as one might expect, these obligations were paid by the U.S. Treasury. Assuming that obligation essentially eliminated any post office surplus during the 10-year scoring window.


The House and Senate held 11 hearings on postal reform between 2003 and 2006. Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee commented, "two issues ... united every single witness who has testified before our committee ... a desire to see the escrow account repealed and the return of the military pension obligation to the Treasury Department."


Bills to this effect were well received in Congress. But again and again the OMB and CBO stepped in to thwart policy makers. In 2004, as the bills were moving rapidly through Congress, the Bush administration stopped the progress by announcing its opposition, justified by the impact on the unified budget. The next year, on the day a highly bipartisan bill was brought to the floor of the House, the administration again threatened a veto because of its "adverse impact on the Federal budget." Congress backed down.


In 2006 Congress finally passed a new law. The Postal Service was allowed to tap into escrow money and pension obligations for military service were shifted back to the U.S. Treasury. But again a quid pro quo was required that negated any financial benefits that would result. To achieve unified budget neutrality the USPS was required to make 10 annual payments of between $5.4 billion and $5.8 billion each to the newly created Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund. The fund could not be tapped to pay actual retiree health benefits during those 10 years.


The level of the annual payments was not based on any actuarial determination. The numbers were produced by CBO as the amounts necessary to offset the loss of the escrow payments.
Remember, this all began because the post office discovered it had surplus funds. Unified budget accounting made sure it could never tap into this surplus unless at the same time it assumed new liabilities of an equal magnitude.


The solution to the post office financial deficit is simple. Give it back the money, that Congress, as a result of pressure from the CBO, has stolen from it over the past years. Then make future payments into the health fund for retirees actuarially based.


Once this artificially generated financial noose is removed from the Postal Service's neck we can get on with helping it navigate the shoals of an uncertain future. To do this USPS must build on its two most important assets: its ubiquitous physical infrastructure and the high esteem in which Americans hold it. In combination, these assets offer the post office an enviable platform upon which to build many new revenue-producing services.


But to do this Congress will have to remove another burden imposed by the 2006 law: a prohibition on the postal service offering non-postal services, like issuing licenses (e.g. drivers, hunting, fishing, etc.) or contracting with local and state agencies to provide services. Congress should also lift the prohibition on the post office shipping wine and beer.


In offering new services the USPS could learn from post offices in other countries. The French post office offers banking and insurance services. Remember that from 1911 to 1967 the U.S. Post Office successfully and profitably ran a nationwide postal savings bank. The Swedish post office will physically deliver email correspondence to people who are not online.


But before any of this will happen we need to 'fess up. The postal crisis is contrived. Let's stop scaring ourselves silly with make -believe deficit monsters and unshackle this national asset.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minn., and director of its New Rules project.

8 Surprising Things That May Be Making Americans Fat.

Photo Credit: Jenn Huls/ Shutterstock.com

 

AlterNet / ByMartha Rosenberg

 

 

Eating too much and exercising too little, considered the root of obesity, are not the only probable culprits.

 

A third of the U.S. population is now overweight, making it just a matter of time before normal-size people are actually in the minority. Americans have so ballooned in size, government safety regulators worry that airline seats and belts won't restrain today's men who average 194 pounds and women who average 165 pounds, in a crash.

Not everyone agrees that obesity is always a health problem. You can be overweight and still have normal blood pressure, blood sugar, HDL cholesterol and other metabolic markers if you exercise, say some, pointing to U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, who hiked the Grand Canyon in 2010 despite her extra poundage.

But others say fitness and exercise will not reverse the health effects of obesity. The British medical journal The Lancet recently reported that rising obesity in the U.K. will cause an extra half a million cases of heart disease, 700,000 cases of diabetes and 130,000 of cancer by 2030. And the overweight and obese are 80 percent more likely to develop dementia writes Kerry Trueman on AlterNet.

And there are other obesity "negatives." The obese are less likely to be employed, earn less than people of normal weight and "have more days of absence from work, a lower productivity on the job and a greater access to disability benefits," reports the Paris-based policy group Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Obesity raises Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance costs and affects national security, writes David Gratzer on KevinMD.com, "since thousands of recruits are turned away from military service because of failed physicals and poor overall health." It also shortens "the lifespan of millions of decent Americans who deserve better," he writes.

Yet eating too much and exercising too little, considered the root of obesity, are not the only probable culprits. Here are some other factors that are often overlooked.


1. Depression and Depression Drugs
Classic depression is characterized by a decrease in appetite, weight loss and general despondency. But in 1994, "atypical depression" debuted, a subtype of depression characterized by an increase in appetite and weight gain (as well as oversensitivity to rejection by others). Unfortunately, both types of depression are often treated with popular antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro and Paxil and antipsychotics like Seroquel, Zyprexa and Risperdal, all of which can pack on the pounds.
To keep the weight gain from affecting Pharma sales, the pro-pill site, WebMD, tells patients that keeping the pounds off is their responsibility since only "healthy eating and exercise help control your weight gain." But it also counsels if the pill weight gain is "so strong that it simply can't be offset by any amount of calorie restricting or even exercise," the psychoactive medication "to help overcome your depression is far more important." To whom?


2. Artificial Sweeteners
Artificial sweeteners, found in soft drinks, many diet foods and an astounding number of children's cereals for unclear reasons, may do more harm than good. While marketed and perceived as helping people avoid calories, they can have two insidious side effects: because they are sweet they encourage sugar craving and sugar dependence just like salty foods train people to crave salt, says research in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.

And, because sweetness is "decoupled from caloric content," they fail to satisfy the sweets reward system and actually further fuel "food-seeking behavior," wrote the researchers. See: giving hungry dog rubber bone. One artificial sweetener, Splenda, also has molecular similarities to endocrine disrupter pesticides, say food safety advocates.


3. Antibiotics
Noting that the average child in the U.S. and other developed countries "has received 10–20 courses of antibiotics by the time he or she is 18 years old," microbiologist Martin Blaser published some disturbing suggestions in the journal Nature last year. By killing "good" bacteria with important roles in the body, "Overuse of antibiotics could be fuelling the dramatic increase in conditions such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and asthma," he reports.

Yes, obesity. Mice given low-dose antibiotics that mimic farm use and high-dose antibiotics that mimic infection treatment in children exhibited preliminary "changes in body fat and tissue composition," says Blaser. Mice developed as much as a 40 percent increase in fat and a 300 percent increase in fat when given a high-fat diet too, extrapolated Alice Wessendorf on the research. Denmark researchers found eerie parallels in humans. Babies given antibiotics within six months of birth were more likely to be overweight by age 7.


4. Endocrine Disrupters
Antibiotics are not the only widely used substances that may be associated with a host of human problems. Chemicals called endocrine disrupters, found in everything from canned foods and microwave popcorn bags to cosmetics and carpet-cleaning solutions, are linked to breast cancer, infertility, low sperm counts, genital deformities, early puberty and diabetes in humans and alarming mutations in wildlife.

Many are aware of the endocrine disrupter BPA (Bisphenol A) banned in baby bottles and sippy cups in Washington state but given a pass by the FDA in March. But few realize that similar endocrine disrupters are found in flame retardants like phthalates and PBDEs, thermal receipts given out at stores and in "antibacterial" dish detergents and toothpaste, like Tricoslan found in Colgate's Total. Endocrine disrupters may also be linked to obesity. Pregnant women with high levels of PFOA, one disrupter, were three times as likely to have daughters who grow up to be overweight, reported the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof in May.


5. Start 'em Young Marketing
Bad eating is learned young and unfortunately some of the worst messages come from TV, parents and school. In a study in the journal Pediatrics, 4- to 6-year-olds who tasted identical graham crackers and gummy fruit snacks with and without cartoon characters "significantly preferred the taste of foods that had popular cartoon characters on the packaging."

Researchers who studied 500,000 California middle- and high-school students found those with schools near fast-food outlets were heavier. And another study of kids 12 to 19 found not one child ate a diet meeting all five of the American Heart Association’s criteria. Even though almost a third of U.S. children and teens are overweight, 84 percent of parents believe their children are at a healthy weight, say researchers, which compounds the problem.


6. Hooked on Cookies…and Chips, Pizzas and Ice Cream
For some overweight people, overeating is an actual addiction. Like alcoholism, food addicts are "preoccupied with their drug (food). Whether they are thinking about their next meal, trying to suppress their cravings, planning their diet, feeling guilty about their last binge [or] hoping to find the strength to say no to that dessert or second helping," writes Arya M. Sharma on KevinMD.com.
Like alcoholics, they dream their troubled relationship to food can miraculously heal, perhaps if their brain readjusts its "setpoint" or they spend "an hour in the gym each day," says Sharma. The increase in food addiction might correlate with the decrease in family meals, indicates some research. Studies by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse reveal that food and other addictions are less likely to develop in children of families who eat together three times a week. Who remembers family meals?


7. Lifestyle Factors
There's another habit we learn (or don't learn) while growing up that can contribute to obesity--a strict bedtime, which few adults or children observe anymore. After just six nights of getting only four hours sleep, healthy young volunteers showed signs of prediabetes, reports the Chicago Tribune.
Other studies show sleep-deprived adults are more likely to be fat, regardless of how much they exercise and what they eat. Why? Researchers hypothesize that sleep deprivation changes levels of the hormone ghrelin (that tells the brain to eat), leptin (that tells the brain we're full) and the stress hormone cortisol. There's even another lifestyle contribution to obesity: room temperature. ABC News reported that air conditioning can add weight by sparing the body the need to regulate temperature, which is a mechanism that burns fat.


8. Government Duplicity
Is the government really helping people to slim down and avoid foods that pack on pounds and invite the risk of heart disease? High-saturated-fat foods like cheese? Not according to a New York Times expose in 2010. A USDA group with 162 employees called Dairy Management, mostly funded by farmers, is shamelessly committed to getting people to double and triple their cheese intake to replace profits from falling milk sales.

According to the Times, Dairy Management has supported Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Burger King, Wendy's and Domino’s in "cheesifying" their menu options, putting dairy farmers' profits before consumer health. "If every pizza included one more ounce of cheese, we would sell an additional 250 million pounds of cheese annually,” rhapsodized the Dairy Management chief executive in a trade publication. Dairy Management received $5.3 million from the USDA during one year, for an overseas dairy campaign, which almost equals the total $6.5 million budget of USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. That's the group that tells people not to eat high fat milk and cheese!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Martha Rosenberg frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food and gun industries on public health. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and other outlets.

New BPA Substitute May Be Equally Dangerous.

by Beth Buczynski

 

Faced with a growing number of scientific studies that show exposure to Bisphenol A (BPA) has a negative impact on human health, companies are starting to remove it from many plastic and paper product. Unfortunately, they’ve largely replaced it with a chemically similar compound, called Bisphenol-S (BPS).


It’s a new twist on the classic bait-and-switch: when consumers are up in arms about the toxicity of a certain material, companies quietly replace it with something equally dangerous, but lesser known. They get to rebrand their products and consumers thing they’re protecting themselves from risk.
A study recently published in Environmental Science & Technology finds that more toxicology research is required before we’ll really know whether BPS is safer than BPA. Although it has not been studied as much as BPA, preliminary studies show that BPS shares many of the same hormone-mimicking properties.


In the study, researchers found BPS in 16 types of paper and paper products, including thermal receipts, paper currencies, flyers, magazines, newspapers, food contact papers, airplane luggage tags, paper towels, printing paper and toilet paper. BPS was also found in 87 percent of currency bill samples from 21 countries. This means there is tremendous opportunity for humans to be exposed to the chemical without really knowing about its potential impact.


Even more worrisome is the fact that other research has found that bisphenol S is much less biodegradable than BPA. In a study of eight bisphenol compounds, bisphenol S was the most persistent.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/new-bpa-substitute-may-be-equally-dangerous.html#ixzz1wMBiEXPl

Can BPA Make You Fat?

stevendepolo/Flickr

By Tom Philpott

The food industry likes to portray obesity as a matter of personal responsibility: People who eat too much gain weight, and it's their own fault.


That view willfully neglects the role that industry marketing, particularly to children, plays on shaping people's food habits. Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that exposure to certain industrial chemicals in food, often at very low levels, changes the way people metabolize calories and can lead to weight gain. While no one would say that these chemicals, known as obesogens, are the sole cause of rising rates of obesity in the US, they may well be contributing significantly to it.

One of the most common of these obesogens, as they have become known, is bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, the ubiquitous chemical found in everything from the lining of cans to the paper that most receipts are printed on. Research suggest that it's in the urine of upwards of 90 percent of Americans—evidently at levels high enough to cause harm.

 

According to University of Missouri biologist and notorious BPA researcher Frederick vom Saal, it also affects how the body deals with fat. "BPA reduces the number of fat cells but programs them to incorporate more fat, so there are fewer but very large fat cells, vom Saal recently told Environmental Health Perspectives. "BPA exposure is producing in animals the kind of outcomes that we see in humans born light at birth: an increase in abdominal fat and glucose intolerance."


A study released last week by University of California-Irvine researchers further implicates BPA in the obesity problem—and raises even greater suspicion about a related compound called bisphenol A Diglycidyl ether, a combination of of BPA and something called epichlorohydrin, this World Health Organization report explains. It's through BADGE that BPA makes it into in food-can linings. UC-Irvine biologist Bruce Blumberg, who co-authored the study, explained to me in an email that the BPA that ends up in our food through can linings gets there when BADGE breaks down into its components.


Blumberg and his team found, though, that BADGE in its whole state is an even more potent obesogen than BPA—and its effects are independent of BPA. Both BADGE and BPA can trigger preadipocytes—which are known as "pre-fat cells" because they can either lie dormant, copy themselves, or turn into fat—to become fat cells. The Cal-Irvine researchers tested the effects BADGE and BPA have on stem cells, our bodies' cellular building blocks that can differentiate into the whole variety of human cells. They found that while BADGE can turn stem cells into fat cells at tiny doses, BPA doesn't have that effect at all. The result surprised Blumberg and his team, because they went into the study assuming that BADGE wasn't an obesogen.


How small are the doses at which BADGE does its dirty work? Blumberg told me that the stuff can induce stem cells to become fat cells at levels as low as 3 parts per billion. That's way, way below the level the FDA has declared the "no observed adverse effect level" for BADGE, which is 15 parts per million, Blumberg wrote in an email.


While numerous studies have measured how much BPA leaches from cans and into our bodies, very little research has been done on our exposure to BADGE in its whole state. But BADGE does appear to leach into food. Blumberg says that one study found it in humans at a level of around 15 parts per billion—significantly more than the 3 per per billion at which his team saw fat-inducing effects.


Clearly, more research needs to be done to sort out just BADGE turns stem cells to fat cells at tiny doses. Perhaps it's the other ingredent in BADGE, epichlorohydrin, that has the fat-transforming effect on stems cells; or perhaps its the way BPA and epichlorohydrin interact. But the UC-Irvine study represents yet another bit of evidence that the FDA, which recently reaffirmed its approval of BPA in can linings, isn't taking the threat of industrial chemicals in food nearly seriously enough. And it also strongly suggests that at least some of our obesity problem stems not from personal choice but rather from decisions made behind closed doors by the food and chemical industries, which have found it profitable to put this stuff in our food containers.

5 Things You Should Always Recycle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From:

https://www.recyclebank.com/live-green/5-things-you-should-always-recycle/

 

 

Chances are you're already recycling the cans, bottles, and paper that gets picked up at the curb, but what about all that other stuff that's lurking in your drawers or closets - like outdated gadgets and dead batteries - that you're not sure how to recycle? The following household items are especially important to donate or recycle because they contain materials that can contaminate the environment if they wind up in landfills or that can easily be reclaimed for use in new products. Here are some convenient ways to keep them out of the trash:

 According to the EPA, recycling just one computer CPU and one monitor is equivalent to preventing 1.35 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from being released and recycling one television prevents four to eight pounds of lead from being added to the waste stream.

1. Electronics: All Office Depot, Staples, and Best Buy stores accept larger electronics like desktop computers for recycling for a small fee (usually $10) and smaller ones like cell phones and PDAs for free. Goodwill stores accept used computer equipment (some locations also accept televisions) for free.
   And you can earn RecycleBank Points by recycling MP3 players/iPods, laptops, and cell phones through our partners at Collective Good, FlipSwap, and Gazelle.
   
   Why: You'll keep toxic materials like lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and brominated flame retardants out of landfills. And useful materials will be recovered, saving energy and resources.
   
   
   
2. Rechargeable batteries: From cordless phones and power tools, digital cameras, and other gizmos - these can be recycled for free at 30,000 drop-off points nationwide, including retailers such as Home Depot, Lowe's, RadioShack, Sears, and Target. Enter your zip code at Call2Recycle to find one near you.
   Unfortunately, it's more difficult to find places to recycle alkaline (or single-use) batteries. Try Earth911 to find drop off locations or order a box (for $34.50, including prepaid shipping) from Battery Solutions and send them up to 12 pounds of alkaline and/or rechargeable batteries for recycling.
   
   Why: Like many electronics, batteries contain heavy metals and other chemicals best kept out of the waste stream. Plus, recyclers reclaim metals from them that are used to make, for example, new batteries and steel.
   
   
   
3. Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs use 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs, but they contain a small amount of mercury and shouldn't be thrown in the trash. Take them to any Ikea or Home Depot store for recycling or go to Lamp Recycle to find other drop off locations near you.
   Why: CFLs in landfills can break and release mercury, a neurotoxin, into the environment.
   
   
   
   
4. Plastic Bags: Even if you've switched to reusable bags for your shopping, you probably have a bunch of these stored in your home. Luckily, lots of retailers like Wal-Mart, Safeway, Albertsons, Wegmans, Krogers, and Giant now have bins where you can recycle plastic grocery bags (and newspaper, drycleaning, bread, and sealable food storage bags). To find a drop off location near you, go to Plastic Bag Recycling or Earth911.
   Why: They're made from petroleum, a non-renewable resource, and when thrown away they take a very long time to decompose. Recyclers will turn them into new products like plastic lumber.
   
   
   
5. Anything you don't need that could be of great value to others — for instance, you can donate your used prescription glasses to the nonprofit OneSight at any LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Target Optical, or Sears Optical location (or go to One Sight for more locations near you). You can also donate unused, unexpired medications including antibiotics, pain relievers, and others by mailing them to the Health Equity Project. The glasses and medications will be distributed to people in need in developing countries.
   

Keep in mind that you should always recycle hazardous substances like paint, pesticides, propane gas tanks, and motor oil at your town's household hazardous waste collection events or permanent collection center. Go to Earth911or call 1-800-CLEANUP to find collection sites and events.