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The Importance of Indoor Air Quality in Your Home

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Air Pollution in Your Home

We’ve covered why it’s critical to clean up your foods and personal-care products. Now it’s time to examine the chemicals in your home. A growing body of scientific evidence has indicated that the air within homes and buildings can be more seriously polluted than the outdoor air in even the largest and most industrialized cities.

At no other time in history have there been so many toxins and pollutants in our environment, particularly the home. The home is the No. 1 source for toxic chemicals.

According to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), Common toxic chemicals found in the home are three times more likely to cause cancer than airborne pollutants. The EPA has also reported that nearly every American has 30 cancer-causing chemicals detectable in their fatty tissue.

This is another great reason to clean up toxic chemical products at home. It’s part of your preventive-medicine strategy.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the air within our homes can be five to 10 times more heavily polluted than outdoor air, even in the largest industrial cities. This is critical because individuals in Western industrialized cities spend up to 90% of their time indoors. One of the primary sources of this indoor air pollution is chemical cleaners, which also happen to be one of the easiest areas to fix. [Read more…]

Chemicals to Avoid in Your Personal Care Products

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Chemicals to Avoid in Your Personal-Care Products

The average adult uses nine personal care products daily, exposing him or her to 126 chemicals every day (for many women, the numbers can be higher). This statistic accounts for personal care products alone—not the chemicals in your foods, environment, or home. Here are some interesting facts about personal care products sold in the U.S. marketplace today:

Fact: The Food and Drug Administration, unfortunately, does not have control over what goes into personal care products. In fact, the FDA has confirmed its inability to control what goes into them. Essentially, the agency has no oversight with respect to chemical ingredients in products, which means manufacturers can put just about anything they want into them: plasticizers, degreasers, surfactants, carcinogens, reproductive toxins or endocrine disrupters.

Additionally, our government does not mandate safety-testing of industrial chemicals that are used as base ingredients in everyday personal care products like shampoos, conditioners, soaps, lotions,  makeup, deodorant, detergents, spot removers, and air fresheners—and the list continues! [Read more…]

Tips for Reducing Your Water Consumption

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Tips for Reducing Your Water Consumption

Our water, specifically which is sourced from non-bottled varieties, will come from one of two sources – either from above-ground resources like lakes and rivers or from underground aquifers or wells.   To learn the specifics of your local water supply, try requesting an annual water quality report from the utility company providing your community with water. 

There is a lot of creative thought being put into the process of recycling water, using “gray water” and of course, the quality of our water considered potable. The reports are also sent out to customers by July 1st of each year. There you’ll begin to uncover what lurks in your drinking water supply including contaminants and chemicals like chlorine and chloramines (which are toxic to fish and amphibians).

It is important to know what’s in your water supply so you know what you need to filter out. This will help you choose the best water filter for you and your family. The report also gives you a summary of water sources i.e. lakes, rivers, aquifers, reservoirs). To further uncover what’s really in your tap water send a sample to lab and have it tested. [Read more…]

Waste and What You Need To Know About Landfills

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Waste & What You Need To Know About Landfills

When we dispose of our trash, we are simply moving it.  All garbage is sent to landfills where it piles up in large masses.  When you consider that oxygen and water are in short supply in landfills, it takes a long time for garbage to completely break down. But in this process of decomposition, new types of wastes are created. Leachate and two greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide, and methane are created. A leachate is any liquid that, in the course of passing through matter, extracts soluble or suspended solids, or any other component of the material through which it has passed. [Read more…]

Are Toxic Chemicals in Our Food Making Us Fat?

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Are Toxic Chemicals in Our Food Making Us Fat?

One obvious factor is our change in lifestyle. Americans move less in our day-to-day lives than in the past, but we often still eat the same amount of food. These excess calories are then stored away as fat.

Recent research, however, reveals a more complex causality for the obesity epidemic, with science suggesting that environmental chemicals also play a role. Certain chemicals are suspected of altering when, why and how much the body creates fat cells or stores fat in existing cells.

Chemicals found in our food, home and work environments and in the products we buy are among the substances linked to how our body creates or stores fat. [Read more…]

Can a Green Living Lifestyle Help Prevent Disease?

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Can a Green Living Lifestyle Help Prevent Disease?

The truth is, most of us would not be able to afford to pay for medical expenses directly out of pocket but when you combine our current healthcare crisis with this fact, it becomes unsettling to think of what might happen if our client needs treatment for a serious or terminal illness. This is why we have to look at taking our own health and our health care needs into our own hands. This involves becoming our own health advocate, of sorts, and to become familiar with the term “preventative medicine” in the more immediate sense. [Read more…]

Reasons That Going Green and Sustainable Living Makes Sense

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Why Going Green Makes Sense

There is a variety of reasons to go green, but most come back to supply and demand. We have a limited amount of resources available and more and more people using them up. If we want our future generations to enjoy the same standard of living we’ve experienced, we need to take action.

Green building is a great place to start, as buildings consume 14% of potable water, 40% of raw materials, and 39% of energy in the United States alone (according to the US Green Building Council). That’s 15 trillion gallons of water and 3 billion tons of raw materials each year! If that’s not enough to convince you, here are some other reasons to go green:

For The Environment

Want to make the world a better place? Implementing green practices into your home or office can help reduce waste, conserve natural resources, improve both air and water quality, and protect ecosystems and biodiversity. [Read more…]

What is Green Living?

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As always, we want our clients to be healthy.  For most coaches, this means that we begin by inspiring clients toward end goals that support healthy lifestyles and behaviors. But many times, we overlook a few things. 

Specifically, it is very easy to overlook our client’s homes and the surrounding environment when evaluating their health.  How does this happen?  [Read more…]

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