Category Archives: Health

Healthy Living Tips 101

Here are three simple Top Tips For Healthy Living (printable) PDFs, with clear information on things we must do to live healthier lives, including things to do and things to avoid, in order to prevent cancer and other health problems that are linked to all the everyday toxic exposures we are currently subjected to. Continue reading

“Artificial scents have no place in our hospitals”

Canada’s top medical journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), says
Artificial scents have no place in our hospitals

Hospital NO Fragrance

“These patients may be involuntarily exposed to artificial scents from staff, other patients and visitors, resulting in worsening of their clinical condition. As patients,
family members and emergency physicians will attest, the attacks can be quite sudden and serious. There is little justification for continuing to tolerate artificial scents in our
hospitals.” …

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Shouldn’t Cleaning Products REMOVE Pollutants Instead of ADDING Them?

Here’s yet another scientific report about how dangerous chemicals and VOCs are being released from the everyday cleaning products most people use in their homes!

Environmental Defense (Canada) recently released their report THE DIRTY TRUTH, which found that products from some of the biggest cleaning brands (Mr. Clean, Clorox, Lysol, Windex, and PineSol ) pollute the air in Canadians’ homes with harmful chemicals. (Note that these products are not significantly, if at all different in the US, but the EU does have some bans on ingredient that are still allowed here).

ED’s The Dirty Truth follows hot on the heels of Women’s Voices For the Earth’s DEEP CLEAN report, and while both of these reports name names, they had a slightly different focus.

In Deep Clean, Women’s Voices For the Earth graded four major cleaning product manufacturers based on key indicators to expose their commitment to product safety: Product Ingredient Disclosure, Responsiveness to Consumer Concerns, Toxic Chemical Screening Process and Removal of WVE’s Chemicals of Concern.

Dr. Anne Steinemann’s research from earlier this year did not name product names, but she named numerous harmful volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) that the many popular products she tested do release into the air we breathe.

One has to wonder why this is allowed to be going on?

We should not be subjected to harmful industrial pollutants in our own homes!

cleaning pollution 1.

“Our new report found that products from some of the biggest cleaning brands (Mr. Clean, Clorox, Lysol, Windex, and PineSol ) pollute the air in Canadians’ homes with harmful chemicals called Volatile Organic Compounds. These chemicals have been linked to respiratory problems such as asthma and lower IQs.”

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 Volatile Organic Compounds and Your Health

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I Love Pollution

 Said No-one Ever

said no one ever 3.

Although, come to think of it, maybe someone HAS said they love pollution!

Those who profit while creating it are no-doubt not complaining about pollution, and some of  those who sell us things like inhalers and  drugs are actually loving pollution’s effects on their bank balances:

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Industry Approved Actions to Spare Your Air, Lungs, and Brain

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If only the air was this good all the time!

If only the air was in the blue range all the time!

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Sometimes summer air just plain sucks. It can and does cause all kinds of health problems. Here then are some tips from Air Quality Ontario on what we humans can do to reduce our exposure to harmful pollutants and our impact on outdoor air.
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Note that none of these suggestions are enforceable. They are entirely voluntary for those of us who manage to learn of their existence. Many of us only find out about these tips once we are so adversely affected by pollutants that we couldn’t do these things even if we wanted to, which means the tips are most useful for the people who aren’t personally affected enough (yet) to understand the need for them.
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(reducing industry impacts on air will just have to wait until enough of us demand it)
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During a Special Air Quality Statement, there are a number of actions that you can take to help spare the air:

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Why Exposure Monitoring Would Be Medically Validating

We (as a society) are facing unprecedented kinds of health problems and challenges that can easily (if you do any research) be explained by our 24/7 exposure to toxic chemicals in everyday products and materials, GMOs (and pesticides) in our “food” supply, and 24/7 exposure to unsafe levels of wireless radiation.

Harmful pollutants are now in our air, water, food, clothing, and you name it, it’s likely to be either made with toxic materials, or has 2nd or 3rd hand toxic chemical contamination from passing through a toxic environment. These exposures add up, and are messing with our health and well-being in ways that are not yet well-understood, but point to the urgent need to stop business as usual, and stop burdening our bodies with so many harmful pollutants that we were simply not designed to process.

There is money to be made by selling drugs, even if the drugs aren’t appropriate to the condition,  do nothing to heal what’s wrong, and often just make things worse, much worse.

Stephen Genuis is a researcher who has published many peer reviewed articles dealing with environmental health. In 2014 the official journal of the Canadian Family Physician published two of them. I shared the abstract from one of them last year.

I am going to “quote” extensively from the other article here, as most of you don’t follow the links, but will read what I have here.

Pandemic of idiopathic multimorbidity
Stephen J. Genuis, MD FRCSC DABOG DABEM

Canadian Family Physician June 2014 vol. 60 no. 6 511-514

“Sitting among colleagues in the private room of a swank eatery, I recently had the pleasure of participating in a pharmaceutical industry–sponsored medical education event allegedly exploring the management of patients presenting to their health providers with multisystem health complaints.

The animateur for the evening—an eloquent orator with impressive credentials—raised the issue of the rising prevalence of patients who present with a laundry list of ongoing and seemingly unrelated persistent complaints often including headache, joint pain, fatigue, brain fog, bloating, chemical intolerance,1 muscle aches, itchy skin, and so on.”

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Are Healthy Hospitals Possible?

That may seem like a dumb question to people who haven’t been in a hospital, but to the rest of us, including those of us who can’t even go into a hospital in life or death situations, it’s a serious one.

hospitals make us sick

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Check out this TEDMED video where Robin Guenther* discusses connections between health and environmental design, and what she and others are doing to make things  different:

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2014 Statistics for MCS, FM, and CFS in Canada

The 2014 statistics for Canadians reporting a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, or multiple chemical sensitivities, (by sex, household population aged 12 and older) are here:

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When Women Don’t Relinquish Fragrance

Guest post by By Heidi Utz

Several years ago, I posed to my women’s group a simple question: Can we ask members not to wear fragrances here? A hush fell over the room, then a silence so vast you could have heard a vial of Obsession drop. The same sweet women I’d grown to respect morphed into a pack of rabid wolves. No perfume?! It was as if I’d proposed giving up coffee, sugar, and styling gel in one fell swoop.

Since then, I have spent much time puzzling over their response. Are we so addicted to our scented products that the very notion of relinquishing them strikes terror in our hearts? Or is it more that the perfume industry has done such a stellar job in marketing its wares? Even in Santa Fe, where a comparatively high level of health-consciousness exists, we’re still susceptible to those redolent magazine ads, featuring the young and glossily naked in their evidently perfume-induced attractiveness.

But what if perfumiers, like chemical producers, were forced to include in their ads the manufacturer’s safety data sheets (i.e., the very interesting ways each spritz affects your liver)? Sound far-fetched?

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Fragrance Facts Brochure

I’ve been looking through some of my old files and ran across this printable brochure about fragrances. Made by Betty Bridges in 2002, it has very useful information that is still relevant.

What has changed since then is that fragrance industry members voluntarily disclosed over 3000 ingredients that they commonly use (only they know how many were not disclosed, as the fragrance industry is still not regulated), and more research has come out on how harmful many of the fragrance ingredients are.

Additionally,  many  more people have become permanently disabled with MCS/ES, often originally triggered from fragrance chemical exposures (in Canada, there was a 31% increase in people diagnosed with MCS between 2005 and 2010, with many more undiagnosed due to a lack of doctors trained in environmental health matters), and  now it has become impossible to avoid 1st, 2nd and 3rd hand fragrance chemical exposures in the “developed” world, so everyone is constantly being exposed to these chemicals.

Fragrance Brochure 1- horz screenshots

Screenshot of brochure. Download the document at link below.

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