River Soap WebLog

2012-08-14T10:30:00.001-07:00

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#12 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-10-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

12. Grapes
Imported grapes run a much greater risk of contamination than those grown domestically. Only imported grapes make the 2010 Dirty Dozen list. Vineyards can be sprayed with different pesticides during different growth periods of the grape, and no amount of washing or peeling will eliminate contamination because of the grape's thin skin. Remember, wine is made from grapes, which testing shows can harbor as many as 34 different pesticides. Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include kiwi and raspberries.

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#11 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-10-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

11. Potatoes
America's popular spud reappears on the 2010 Dirty Dozen list, after a year hiatus. America's favorite vegetable can be laced with as many as 37 different pesticides. Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include eggplant, cabbage, and earthy mushrooms.

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#10 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-10-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

10. Cherries
Even locally grown cherries are not necessarily safe. In fact, in one survey in recent years, cherries grown in the U.S. were found to have three times more pesticide residue then imported cherries. Government testing has found 42 different pesticides on cherries. Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include raspberries and cranberries.

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#9 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-09-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

9. Kale
Traditionally, kale is known as a hardier vegetable that rarely suffers from pests and disease, but it was found to have high amounts of pesticide residue when tested this year. Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include cabbage, asparagus, and broccoli.

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#8 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-09-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

8. Spinach
New on the list for 2010, spinach can be laced with as many as 48 different pesticides, making it one of the most contaminated green leafy vegetable.

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#7 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-09-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

7. Bell peppers
Peppers have thin skins that don't offer much of a barrier to pesticides. They're often heavily sprayed with insecticides. (Tests have found 49 different pesticides on sweet bell peppers.) Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include green peas, broccoli, and cabbage.

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#6 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-09-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

6. Nectarines
With 33 different types of pesticides found on nectarines, they rank up there with apples and peaches among the dirtiest tree fruit. Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include, watermelon, papaya, and mango.

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#5 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-08-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

5. Blueberries
New on the Dirty Dozen list in 2010, blueberries are treated with as many as 52 pesticides, making them one of the dirtiest berries on the market.

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#4 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-08-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

4. Apples
Like peaches, apples are typically grown with poisons to kill a variety of pests, from fungi to insects. Tests have found 42 different pesticides as residue on apples. Scrubbing and peeling doesn't eliminate chemical residue completely, so it's best to buy organic when it comes to apples. Peeling a fruit or vegetable also strips away many of their beneficial nutrients. Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include watermelon, bananas, and tangerines.

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#3 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-08-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

3. Strawberries
If you buy strawberries, especially out of season, they're most likely imported from countries that have less-stringent regulations for pesticide use. 59 pesticides have been detected in residue on strawberries. Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include kiwi and pineapples.

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#2 Toxic Fruits & Veggies to Avoid (unless organic)

2010-08-07T10:16:00.000-07:00

2. Peaches
Multiple pesticides (as many as 62 of them) are regularly applied to these delicately skinned fruits in conventional orchards. Can't find organic? Safer alternatives include watermelon, tangerines, oranges, and grapefruit.

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Dirty Dozen: Toxic Fruits & Vegies to Avoid

2010-07-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

2010 Dirty Dozen:
1. Celery
Celery has no protective skin, which makes it almost impossible to wash off the chemicals (64 of them!) that are used on crops. Buy organic celery, or choose alternatives like broccoli, radishes, and onions.

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It's summer. UnPlug the Dryer

2010-05-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

Sure it's hard to live without a clothes dryer and some cities even ban clothes lines as unsightly but I love the look of clothes hanging off a line. And for me, I hang my clothes to keep them nice longer, no more shrunken jeans or faded t-shirts.
One friend lays her clothes over her lavender bush to dry- double duty- they dry and smell good. What could be better?

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Can Touching Your Toes Test Your Arteries?

2010-01-04T07:31:00.001-08:00

December 23, 2009, NYTimes
Phys Ed: Can Touching Your Toes Test Your Arteries?
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

A provocative new study published this year in the journal Heart and Circulatory Physiology suggests, however, that there may be a novel way to test at least one element of your heart's health right in your own living room, right in the middle of the holidays. Sit on the floor with your legs stretched straight out in front of you, toes pointing up. Reach forward from the hips. Are you flexible enough to touch your toes? If so, then your cardiac arteries probably are also flexible.
What is surprising are some early indications that increasing your flexibility might somehow loosen up your arteries, too. That was the accidental and, as yet unreplicated finding of a small 2008 study at the University of Texas at Austin. The study was designed to examine whether weight lifting increased arterial stiffness. (It didn't, at least on this occasion.) The control group consisted of people who stretched. They were not expected to show any change in cardiac function, but over the course of 13 weeks they in fact increased the pliability of their arteries by more than 20 percent.

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Fat Friends, Fat You. There is a connection

2009-12-15T07:47:00.001-08:00

Are Your Friends Making You Fat?
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: September 10, 2009
an excerpt

As friends around us become heavier, we gradually change our mental picture of what obese looks like and give ourselves tacit permission to add pounds. With happiness, the two argue that the contagion may be even more deeply subconscious, the spread of good or bad feelings, they say, might be driven partly by mirror neurons in the brain that automatically mimic what we see in the faces of those around us, which is why looking at photographs of smiling people can itself often lift your mood.

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Happy Friends, Happy You-There is a Connection

2009-12-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

Are Your Friends Making You Fat?
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: September 10, 2009
an excerpt
Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. According to their statistical analysis from the Framingham Data, which followed since 1948 more than 15,000 Framingham residents and their descendants, found each additional happy friend boosts your good cheer by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent. So by this logic, adding more links to your network should — mathematically — add to your store of happiness.

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Dry clothes another way

2009-11-30T07:29:00.000-08:00

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Clothes Dryer?

2009-11-20T07:27:00.000-08:00

Alexander P. Lee is executive director of Project Laundry List.
The tumble dryer is the second largest energy-consuming appliance and the leading cause of house fires among appliances. There is no such sense as an Energy Star dryer; these machines are inherently inefficient, using natural gas or electricity to heat air.
Look to Italy and Denmark for guidance.
In Italy, only about three or four percent of households own a dryer. In Denmark, newly constructed student housing included space for indoor drying. In China, the bamboo shaft is still a ubiquitous clothesline. In the United States, approximately 80 percent of households own a dryer. Project Laundry List believes, from anecdotal evidence, that the vast majority of families can see a 10 to 20 percent savings on their electric bill by going cold turkey and setting up a clothesline or drying rack.

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Reduce your risk for breast cancer

2009-11-14T17:48:00.000-08:00

Research has found that the association between frequently eating cabbage and a significantly reduced risk of breast cancer is only seen with raw and short-cooked cabbage foods (steamed cabbage and sauerkraut)
To promote the production of the most glucosinolates, slice or chop your cabbage and let sit for 5-10 minutes before cooking, and cook lightly, steaming or sautéing for 5 minutes or less.

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Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies

2009-11-12T07:18:00.000-08:00

Op-Ed Columnist
Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 7, 2009

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It’s a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies — to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That’s a lot of estrogen.
More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it — though not conclusively — to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.

Now it turns out it’s in our food.

Consumer Reports magazine tested an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relatively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans.

The magazine also says it found BPA in the canned liquid version of Similac Advance infant formula (but not in the powdered version) and in canned Nestlé Juicy Juice (but not in the juice boxes). The BPA in the food probably came from an interior coating used in many cans.

Published journal articles have found that BPA given to pregnant rats or mice can cause malformed genitals in their offspring, as well as reduced sperm count among males. For example, a European journal found that male mice exposed to BPA were less likely to make females pregnant, and the Journal of Occupational Health found that male rats administered BPA had less sperm production and lower testicular weight.

This year, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that pregnant mice exposed to BPA had babies with abnormalities in the cervix, uterus and vagina. Reproductive Toxicology found that even low-level exposure to BPA led to the mouse equivalent of early puberty for females. And an array of animal studies link prenatal BPA exposure to breast cancer and prostate cancer.

While most of the studies are on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported last year that humans with higher levels of BPA in their blood have “an increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities.” Another published study found that women with higher levels of BPA in their blood had more miscarriages.
Bottom line: stay away from canned food if you can!

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Help the planet, paint your roofs white.

2009-11-03T17:46:00.000-08:00

Simply painting roofs white in warm climates decreases air conditioning bills for those buildings by 20 percent. That's one reason why California has required all new buildings to have white roofs for the past few years.
This new study says that if the 100 biggest cities painted all their roofs white, and switched their road materials to lighter colors (concrete instead of asphalt) it would reflect enough light and heat back into space to entirely offset the warming of the last few decades.

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Same as taking every car off the road for 11 years

2009-10-27T17:44:00.000-08:00

Making roads and roofs a paler color could have the equivalent effect of taking every car in the world off the road for 11 years, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.
It was a geo-engineering scheme that was "completely benign" and would keep buildings cooler and reduce energy use from air conditioning, as well as reflecting sunlight back away from the Earth.
For people who found white hard on the eye, scientists had also developed "cool colors" which looked to the human eye like normal ones, but reflect heat like pale colors even if they are darker shades

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Got a tough problem to solve? Try daydreaming.

2009-10-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Got a tough problem to solve? Try daydreaming.
Contrary to the notion that daydreaming is a sign of laziness, letting the mind wander can actually let the parts of the brain associated with problem-solving become active, a new study finds.
Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia in Canada and her colleagues placed study participants inside an fMRI scanner, where they performed the simple routine task of pushing a button when numbers appear on a screen. The researchers tracked subjects' attentiveness moment-to-moment through brain scans, subjective reports from subjects and by tracking their performance on the task.
Until now, scientists had thought that the brain's "default network," which is linked to easy, routine mental activity, was the only part of the brain that remains active when the mind wanders. But in the study subjects, the brain's "executive network" - associated with high-level, complex problem-solving - also lit up.
The less subjects were aware that their mind was wandering, the more both networks were activated.
"This study shows our brains are very active when we daydream - much more active than when we focus on routine tasks," Christoff said. from livescience.com –

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An Apple a day helps prevent bone loss

2009-10-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

A flavonoid found only in apples called phloridzin may help prevent bone loss associated with menopause, suggests a study published in Calcified Tissue International.

A side effect of the sex hormone changes that occur during a woman's transition through menopause is a tendency towards increased inflammation and free radical production, which in turn, promotes bone loss.

Because of their anti-inflammatory actions, polyphenols have been suggested as one means of protecting against bone loss during this pro-inflammatory time in women's lives.

French researchers have discovered that phloridzin may eliminate bone loss in post menopausal women, and even increase bone mineral density.

So go ahead and eat an apple (or two) a day- but make sure it's organic.

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