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March 14, 2017

10 Ways to eat organic on a tight budget

March 14, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

The controversy over whether it’s better to eat organic or conventional food is still alive and well. Many of the debates have focused on whether or not there are any measurable nutritional benefits to eating organic food, while others point out that organic growers still do use pesticides, including a small number of synthetic ones. However, as a recent post in the Sacramento Bee points out, this is the wrong debate to be having.

March 05, 2017

What Everyone Needs to Know about Arsenic in Rice

March 05, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

Exposure to arsenic is a growing global health problem, but there’s a lot that scientists and health workers still don’t know about the extent to which it is affecting the health of vulnerable populations.

What exactly is arsenic, and how does it affect your health? Is there anything you can do to reduce your exposure to arsenic in rice and other food you eat? These are a few of the questions that this week’s blog post aims to answer.

February 26, 2017

Easy, Natural Ways To Boost Your Energy Without Caffeine

February 26, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

guest post by Amy Trotter

If you find yourself lacking energy and going through your day a little more sluggish and slowly, you may need an all-natural energy boost. As strange as it may sound, you can skip the coffee and still feel alert and energetic all day. The key is in how you treat your body, especially with what you put into it.

February 19, 2017

Chronic Inflammation: what is it, and how to treat it without drugs

February 19, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

07/31/2021

Did you know that many of the foods we eat, foods that have been labeled “healthy,” are actually sources of chronic inflammation? If you consume these foods on a regular basis, they are probably causing you to experience inflammation in ways that you may not have even thought of.

February 13, 2017

Chocolate stories, and is dark chocolate really healthy for you?

February 13, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

Chocolate has a history that goes back as far as 4000 years, when it was used by the cultures of MesoAmerica, beginning with the pre-Colombian Olmecs and followed by the Mayans and Aztecs. Back then, it was made as a bitter drink, cooked with water, spices, and no sugar. It was a “drink of the gods,” intended mostly for the elite, with one exception: evidence suggests that some sacrificial victims were given chocolate to drink (spiked with the blood of previous victims) to “get them in the mood” to die.

February 05, 2017

Three factors that influence unhealthy food choices (they have nothing to do with being rich or poor)

February 05, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

A few weeks ago I woke up and read a Twitter conversation sparked by an article written by award-winning food writer Jane Black. Since then, I have thought a lot about the article and the conversations that followed in the Twitterverse. Jane’s guest column, on the website of the Stone Barnes Center for Food and Agriculture, points out how elite foodies are fundamentally out of touch with the reasons behind why less-affluent, rural, and/or poor families hadn’t made a switch to healthier eating.

What struck me most about her essay was her observation that one of the main obstacles preventing less affluent people in red-state America from eating healthy didn’t have anything to do with ignorance, lack of desire, or rebellion against elite coastal foodie cultures. It did have to do with economics, but not in the way you might think...

November 05, 2016

Lifestyle choices and the cancer connection: what you should know

November 05, 2016/ Kelly Pemberton

Almost half of all Americans suffer from chronic health ailments; among these, cancer is second leading cause of death, after heart disease. Although screening and treatment options, as well as a reduction in smoking, have improved the survival odds for many different kinds of cancer, including the 4 most common kinds: lung, colorectal, breast, and lung, the numbers are still high. Over 595,000 Americans are expected to die from cancer in 2016, which translates into over 1600 people per day...

There's no foolproof way to completely eliminate your risk of developing cancer, but there are several ways to decrease your chances. These begin with making the kinds of lifestyle choices that will ensure that your immune system has the strength it needs to keep your body healthy and fight disease effectively.

October 08, 2016

Farm Aid – the best event you’ve barely heard about

October 08, 2016/ Kelly Pemberton

When Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp founded Farm Aid back in 1985, sponsoring its first concert in Champaign Illinois, American farmers were in crisis. A series of droughts had devastated farms in the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and Great Lakes regions, with Kentucky and Ohio suffering their driest spells of the 20th century. Family farms were struggling to stay afloat, with many of them deeply in debt. Although the drought conditions would continue (and in some places, worsen) throughout the 1980s, Farm Aid brought the troubles faced by American family farmers to public consciousness for the first time. It also raised money to help

October 01, 2016

Cold prevention and treatment without the harmful chemicals

October 01, 2016/ Kelly Pemberton

It’s official: summer is over and fall is underway! Kids are back in school and (hopefully) settled into their daily routines. If your family is anything like mine, you’ve already had to deal with the fallout from cold and flu season. Without fail, each time the season changes, the sniffles begin and (if we’re not careful), someone comes down with a cold or flu.

It’s not the temperature changes that cause colds and flu; it’s that certain viruses thrive in the cooler temperatures. Rhinovirus and coronavirus are the most common culprits that cause illness this time of year.

If you have realized that the fall season ushers in the first bouts of cold and flu in your household, there is something you can do to prevent illness from getting your kids (and you too!) off track this season.

May 26, 2016

My favorite DIY green cleaners: safe, effective, and easy to make at home

May 26, 2016/ Kelly Pemberton

Most household cleaning agents contain harmful chemicals that can cause a range of health problems. One set of ingredients in these cleaners is especially problematic, because they are known to cause cancer in humans and animals: formaldehyde and formaldehyde releasers. Sometimes formaldehyde is not actually used as an ingredient in cleaning solutions, but is present as a by-product. For this reason, it does not appear in the list of ingredients; instead, you’ll know that a product contains formaldehyde if you see the names DMDM hydantoin, or 1,4 dioxane listed among a product’s ingredients. It may also be present if other chemical ingredients like formalin, formalith, methanol, methyl aldehyde, methylene glycol, methylene oxide, paraform, or BFV appear in the ingredient list.

On the other hand, you can always make your own green cleaning products.

By making your own household cleaners, you can not only have more control over the ingredients that go into them, thereby reducing your exposure to hazardous chemicals, you can also save money in the process (especially by buying them in bulk).

Here are a few of my favorite DIY green household cleaners.

May 11, 2016

What’s in your drinking water and should you be concerned?

May 11, 2016/ Kelly Pemberton

#CleanWaterWednesday

Although news about the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan has waned in the face of the upcoming Presidential election, the water crisis is far from over. This water crisis was a wake-up call for many people and some of their elected representatives about the dangers of toxic lead (and other contaminants) that have leached into municipal water supplies, partly because of aging or flawed infrastructure.

But while Flint has become the poster child for lead poisoning in particular, and contaminated water systems in general, the attention that has been riveted on Flint by the mainstream media in the US has done little to inform – or alarm – us about the details of other ongoing water crises around the country.

March 17, 2016

Are BPA-free plastics still poisoning you?

March 17, 2016/ Kelly Pemberton

In my book on toxic chemicals, I wrote about the health effects of Bisphenol-A (BPA) as being pervasive: this chemical compound, found in plastics and even in some cash register receipts, has been linked to problems with metabolism, behavior, reproduction, the development of placentas and stem cells, and the growth of cancerous tumors. BPA has been blamed (at least in part) for obesity, diabetes, asthma, infertility, and even…

October 15, 2015

Winter Garden Chronicle: Keeping Your Thumbs Green in the Cold

October 15, 2015/ Kelly Pemberton

It’s hard to acknowledge you’ve failed at something, especially if you’re a type “A” personality like me. But last winter I tried, and failed, to keep my winter container garden alive. Ok, the violas survived the cold and snow, but they don’t count, since they are by nature tolerant of winter weather. Everything else – the Japanese eggplants, the miniature peppers, the carrots, and the green beans, suffered miserably before finally wilting into pathetic looking, half-frozen messes.

September 04, 2015

The (Green) Lunch Revolution: why forcing kids to eat healthy doesn’t work

September 04, 2015/ Kelly Pemberton

Updated 7/31/2021

The Healthy Lunch campaign to deliver more nutritious meals in schools around the country has sparked a national debate over the role of government in dictating lifestyle choices for the nation’s public school students. Yet the movement for healthier, greener lifestyles did not begin with the US government, nor does it end there. In fact, there have been a number of drivers over the past few years that have pushed us, kicking and screaming, to this point of revolution as a nation.

March 06, 2014

Does eating tilapia lead to heart disease?

March 06, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

Should you eat tilapia?

We all know that eating a Mediterranean diet leads to a longer, healthier life. A big part of this diet is fish.

Not all fish are created equal, though. In fact, some doctors have claimed that eating certain kinds of fish may be worse than eating a slab of pork bacon, a box of doughnuts, or a fat, juicy hamburger!

What determines whether any particular kind of fish is good or bad for your health depends on a number of factors...