Health | Wellness | Yoga

According to the Allergy and Environmental Health Association, both liquid and dryer sheet fabric softeners are the most toxic product produced for daily household use. Most of the popular brands of fabric softeners contain many neurotoxins (substances that are toxic to the brain and nervous system) and other types of toxins. Read my article 8 Toxins Lurking in Your Fabric Softener to learn more. So, youre ready to forego commercial fabric softeners but you still want soft clothes. What are your options? Well, here are my 6 suggestions to detox your laundry: 1. Add a 1/2 cup of baking soda to the water in your washing machine and let it dissolve prior to adding your clothes. This is my preferred method since the baking soda acts as a water softener and helps makes clothes super soft. 2. Some people toss tennis balls or other rubber balls into the dryer with clothes. Im not a huge fan of this method since the heat of the dryer can cause the rubber to off-gas onto your clothing. If you

The world of food consciousness is as much about the pleasure and refinement of the dining experience as it is about indulgent and frivolous trends. For every one step towards real culinary innovation there are countless stumbles and staggers in the direction of foodie faddism (example: the Krispy Kreme cheese burger ). It is a case of the foodie world recycling the old to make it seem unique and effectively eating its own tail to keep things feeling fresh and lively. In this case, it is less about eating its own tail and more about eating its own skin chicken skin to be exact. Chicken skin, not to be confused with keratosis pilaris, the topical skin condition resulting in unsightly bumps on the back of your arms, but actual chicken skin, well cooked and crispy, is seemingly the new it ingredient. Previously known as a repository for fat and little nutrition (anywhere from 45 75% of chicken fat resides in the skin) chicken skin is being celebrated as the new snack, ingredient, and in

Earlier: Recovering From an Affair The cruelest lies are often told in silence. Robert Louis Stevenson There is no bigger paradigm shift that a relationship experiences than in the aftermath of disclosing or discovering an affair.The betrayal cuts deep and shreds not only the trust between the couple, but often the ability to trust ones own judgment and the agreements that we believed defined our lives.Less than a third of all couples who encounter the experience, which is more than half of all of us, actually heal the experience. Many couples never get beyond the initial crisis that the affair creates, choosing to leave the relationship with their wounds intactand the rest of the relationship in tatters. Often this knee jerk response is a result of fear and ignorance. The pain and instability it creates feels all-consuming and we dont know how to navigate the process.Considering how prevalent the experience of affairs is, there has been little education about the proces

Ive always been a fan of the underdogs in the produce realm. While resplendent tomatoes and juicy peaches are the effortless beauty queens of the garden, Im drawn to the hard-working dirty roots. Carrots, rutabagas and beets are like vibrant treasures pulled from the dark soil, their buoyant nutrition and flavor the result of soaking up and storing vital nutrients from the ground as well as the plants they support. Technically, the term root vegetables includes only those that are either tuberous roots or taproots and include beets, cassava, carrots, horseradish, radishes, rutabagas, salsify, turnips and parsnips. Other categories of underground vegetables include: bulbs (onions, garlic), corms (celeriac, eddo, taro), rhizomes (ginger, galangal, turmeric), and tubers (potatoes and the like). That said, most people refer to the whole shebang of edible underground plants as root vegetables. This range of underground vegetables varies from the quotidian carrot to more otherworldly roots l

True misery is the pain and swelling caused by sinus inflammation. The bones around the nose, the eyes and the cheeks are lined with membranes that produce mucus, which function to warm and moisten inhaled air, plus to filter out any germs. When congested and unable to drain properly the mucus continues to accumulate, stagnate and become infected. There are a number of causes for chronic sinus infections: Excessive dairy consumption (cheese, milk, ice cream, yogurt) Environmental allergies Tobacco and pollution irritation Food allergies Dental infection Fungal infection in the sinus cavity Systemic Candida albicans (overgrowth of yeast) Colds and flu symptoms Typical allopathic treatments for sinus inflammation can include prescription antibiotics, steroids, anti-inflammatories, and in some cases, surgery. In fact it is common for people to be taking five different medications to treat their sinus infection. Even with the medications relief is minimal until milk, cheese, ice cream, and

By Marlo Sollitto, AgingCare.com contributing editor Elderly people are at increased risk of food-borne illness because as they age, their immune systems become weaker. In fact, thewebsite for the Centers for Disease Control estimates that each year about 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die from food-borne diseases. The most severe cases tend to occur in the very old. The good news is that food poisoning can be prevented if you follow proper home food safety practices. Get More Energy by Eating Smart Ruth Frechman, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, spoke with AgingCare.com about home food safety for elderly people. Since older adults are at particular risk for food-borne illness, good food safety habits are extremely crucial. Ms. Frechman says three common cooking and food preparation mistakes can result in unsafe food and potential food poisoning. Top 3 Food Preparation Mistakes That C! ause Foo d-borne Ill

Remember the famous scene from When Harry Met Sally ? Harry swears that all his girlfriends are having O-O-Orgasms during sex and Sally questions his bravado. She wonders how hes so sure his girlfriends arent just faking it. He insists he would know. Sally then delivers an orgasmic performance that made cinematic history. Oh oh- oh yeah, baby. Turns out Sally knew what she was talking about, and way more women fake it than you may think. A survey of almost 6,000 people published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found that 85% of dudes said their partners climaxed during their most recent sex act. But psych only 64% of women reported that they actually got off. Whats with that? Why The Orgasm Gap? Why does this happen? Why are we women giving our partners false encouragement? How many guys do you know who pretend to get off to please a partner? I dont think so. No if a guy needs more stimulation, hes likely to tell you so (well, and its likely to be obvious, of course.) But what ab

I had the pleasure of attending a fund-raising dinner at Pie Ranch , a local working farm in Pescadero, CA, this past Saturday. Id been gifted the tickets and had some idea of what to expect: a lovely outdoor meal with about a hundred other people; paired wines; farm-raised meats and veggies; dancing!; and pie (as the name implies, and they live up to it!). What I didnt expect was to be moved by the mission and backbone of the farm. Its a true call to presence this project of farming and educating that the founders, Nancy Vail, Jered Lawson, and Karen Heisler, created out of a triangular (hence the name) piece of land. Pie ranch hosts youth from local and regional high schools and teaches them about the actuality, beauty, necessity and power of growing food. They extend this educational outreach to apprentice farmers who spend an entire year immersed in the business of farming. As Pie Ranch states, Our mission is to inspire and connect people to know the source of their food , and

In Maharishi Ayurveda (SanskritAyus life, and Veda knowledge or science, hence the science of life or the knowledge of life span), a balanced diet does not revolve around fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. Nor are calories, vitamins, and minerals given direct attention. These nutrients are known to us intellectually, not through direct experience. You cannot detect vitamin C in your orange juice, much less the difference between it and vitamin A. When your taste buds greet a bite of food, an enormous amount of useful information is delivered to the doshas (three operating principles situated in the interconnectedness between mind and body). Working solely with this information, Ayurveda allows us to eat a balanced diet naturally, guided by our own instincts, without turning nutrition into an intellectual headache. When food talks to your doshas, it says many things, because the different gunas (qualities)heavy and light, dry and oily, hot and coldare present in it. But the prima

Arsenic, the poison of choice for bygone assassinations and mid-century murder mysteries, is a metalloid (sharing properties of metals and non-metals) that is found in rock and soil, with trace amounts in some areas and heavy concentrations in others. It has been responsible for the deaths and illnesses of many through water, food, and occupational exposure. It is has even been suggested that the painters Czanne, Monet, and Van Gogh all suffered from the deleterious effects of arsenic as it was a component of their medium. The issue of arsenic in drinking water isnt a new one; arsenic leaches into groundwater causing varying degrees of contamination. And just because its naturally seeping from natural rocks doesnt mean its harmless. The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry lists 275 hazardous substances at toxic waste sitesarsenic ranks as number one, based on risks to people living around those sites. As you may have heard, recently, celebrity health guru Dr. M

Recently I had quite a surprising conversation with a middle-aged couple I know about transgender people. The couple, who had been together for well over 15 years in a very happy marriage, came out as somewhat tolerant, but highly critical of the transgender community, and typified the transgender lifestyle as a charade masking larger psychological problems. While this may not seem to you like an unexpected sentiment coming from a middle-aged couple in America, this couple was hardly the stodgy conservative type. Bleeding heart liberals, crusaders of same-sex rights, and gay proud to the highest degree; this couple found the transgender community objectionable, in part, because they felt the transgender identity weighed negatively upon the larger gay and lesbian agenda, in both a social and political way. The fact is, while the gay and lesbian community is experiencing some of the widest acceptance, tolerance, and support it has ever seen, the transgender community is still largely reg

When it comes to the price of food, I think its extremely important to remember that a food cannot be judged by its sticker price alone. Whether or not youre actually getting any nutrition from it is far more important. Believe me, a diet consisting of daily $1.99 hamburgers and other fast foods , while appearing to be frugal, is far from it when you consider what these foods are doingor not doingto your health. This will be a progressively increasing concern as we are virtually assured in the United States and many other countries that there will be serious inflation coming as a result of the massive devaluation of the dollar. Processed Foods are Massive Rip-Offs While trying to list every single food thats a complete rip-off would result in a very thick book, I firmly believe its safe to say that virtually all processed snacks and the majority of processed , pre-packaged meals are a massive waste of money. These types of foods consist mainly of fillers and additives, and very few

by Katy Farber, Moms Clean Air Force School is in full swing now. I have been pretending that it isnt really happening because I know, as a teacher, once I go back, I hit the ground running, and dont look up until November! In my many roles as a teacher, blogger, and clean air activist, I offer some tips for how to give your child the cleanest and healthiest air possible in school. Indoor air quality can be very poor in schools due to lack of ventilation and because many are old structures. And as we know, schools can besited in industrial areas with extensive air pollution . What can concerned parents do? 5 Ways To Clean Up The Air At Your Childs School 1. Investigate : Begin checking out what kind of cleaners are used in your childs classroom. If they are conventional industrial cleaners, they likely contain harmful chemicals that could be damaging to your childs lungs, especially if they are already sensitive. Often, schools use these because they dont know they are harmful.

In her last article , Sara Childre mentioned the Global Coherence Initiative, launched by the Institute of HeartMath (IHM). I am passionate about the Global Coherence Initiative (CGI) and want to tell you more about it. With an international membership of 34,000, GCI has developed advanced sensing technology to observe changes in the earths ionosphere and geomagnetic field that result from collective human emotional states, whether positive and coherent or negative and incoherent. Some have described it as listening in on the heart rhythms and brainwaves of our planet. One of the questions GCI scientists ask is, What if a critical mass of people intentionally generating positive coherent emotional states could positively affect the earths energetic fields in ways that help stabilize the fields and possibly our weather patterns? Coherence itself is not new. Human beings have always been able to achieve it under the right conditions. It is our understanding of coherence that is relativ

By Heather Ashare for DietsInReview.com Words like sustainable, eco-friendly, and green have become commonplace in our vernacular. Today, eating, living, breathing and being with a greater awareness of how our actions affect not only ourselves, but our community and planet has never been so urgent. It is the small actions we do regularly that accumulate to a greater and more long-lasting benefit, the choices you make in your daily eating and cooking practices can have a profound effect on the health of our bodies and planet. Make a commitment to follow one, five or all of these sustainable eating tips and notice the subtle changes in your world: 1. Eat the whole vegetable . Rather than tossing out the stems of broccoli, Swiss chard, or the greens attached to beets, eat them. Sautee these greens , which are edible and very nutritious, with a bit of olive oil and salt or add them to just about any dish you are making. 2. Turn your basement into a food cellar . If you have a basement, cl