This season’s Biggest Loser featured an episode where the contestants were invited to the White House to visit First Lady Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden. They plucked and harvested lush and supple items that were brought back into the White House kitchen, where everyone was put to work to learn and prepare a presidential salad, which they could easily recreate and incorporate into their everyday meal. What a fun idea!

And this is no wimpy vegetable garden that Mrs. Obama cultivated with her own two hands, nope - it’s a garden Martha would be proud of, showcasing 55 varieties of organic vegetables, from arugula to spinach, chard, collards, kale, and a colourful array of lettuces including red romaine, butterhead, galactic, and red leaf. There are also berries and herbs and two hives of honey to boot. She had some super helpers, too. In fact, 23 grade 5 students from Bancroft Elementary School, along with her own family, helped her build this healthful garden.

But good things are not only growing in Washington - it is a healthy movement that is gaining remarkable steam all over North America. [Read more →]

Bring a little of the outdoors to your indoors!

Houseplants add an organic, natural touch to rooms in your home or to your office workspace. Gazing at the greenery amidst that tangle of cords and technology can be quite soothing.

According to Eureka! Science News, “Adding these plants to indoor spaces can reduce stress, increase task performance, and reduce symptoms of ill health.”

Not only that, plants can also help to clean up indoor air - which can sometimes be even more polluted than the air outside!

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) given off by furniture, paints, building supplies, and office equipment can make people sick, triggering headaches, nausea, dizziness, irritation to eyes, nose, and throat, and worsening of asthma symptoms. Long-term exposure to high VOC levels can increase risks of cancer and damage to the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system. (Read more about “sick-building syndrome” here.)

But thanks to a process called phytoremediation, indoor plants can gobble up these pollutants. Of the plants tested by researchers from the University of Georgia Department of Horticulture, a few leafy species seemed to have super pollutant-neutralizing powers:

- Purple waffle plant

- English ivy

- Variegated wax plant

- Asparagus fern

- Purple heart plant

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Got pets? Before bringing plants into a pet household, check their toxicity to cats and dogs (known to nibble on leaves now and then …)

The word is out: commuting can be bad for you.

Well, what a surprise. You have a choice between driving crowded streets or being herded around in public transit. But you can’t always avoid it. Some of us work where we wouldn’t want to live.

Take me, for instance. [Read more →]

With recent E. coli, salmonella, and listeria outbreaks in Canada and the US, talk has come back to irradiation as a way of making food safer.

We probably all recall – some of us may still have – “Don’t nuke my food” buttons and stickers. There’s this idea that irradiation must somehow make food radioactive. (Oddly, we don’t seem to mind “nuking” our food with microwave radiation – a different kind of radiation, but still, it could have been targeted by the same kind of campaign!) Actually, those initiating the campaigns against irradiation – and anyone who’s gotten beyond the level of scare – knows that the concern is actually that the irradiation process might be creating a new class of chemical, cyclobutanones, that can cause cancer.

Health Canada and the US FDA disagree with this concern. They point to studies that show that irradiated food is safe, that there is no significant cost in nutritional value, and they disagree with the conclusions reached from the data in the studies conducted by irradiation opponents. [Read more →]