The characters you meet in this quick video are cartoons, but the plot is ripped straight from the headlines. It’s appalling to realize how the Toxic Chemicals Lobby twists and distorts information to keep their profits rolling in at the expense of our collective health.

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

Whole Foods Marketplace Inc. announced that it is raising the bar on organic skin care products, meaning that it will only carry items claiming to be organic that are actually organic and contain organic ingredients.

Back in January, I posted about so-called organic cheater brands and how deceptive labeling is allowed on skin care products because they are not regulated. Thanks to the watchdog group the Organic Consumers Association for bringing this to our attention.

According to the statement, starting next June, Whole Foods will require that its suppliers of personal-care products making organic claims meet the same U.S. Department of Agriculture standards as food does. That means products labeled as “organic” must be made with more than 95% organic ingredients. If the label says the product is made with organic ingredients, it actually must contain at least 70% organic ingredients.

While I wish that the USDA would require “organic” to mean 100% organic, I’m quite pleased that Whole Foods will make it easier for me to trust more of the products on its shelves. Right now, quite frankly, I’ve frequently questioned their personal care product selection after carefully reading the labels and wondered if I were in a Walgreens rather than a health food market.

Maybe Whole Foods will become more like Vitamin Cottage, a smaller health food grocer chain that adheres to much stricter organic standards, and where I always feel much more comfortable when selecting new skin care products.

I count this as a win in the war to reclaim the guarantee that the products we eat and use on our bodies are safe.

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

It looks like “natural fragrances” may mean as much as “natural flavors” do on a label in terms of the chemical load they bring to your body.

The study found 38 unlisted chemicals in the testing. The average fragrance tested contained 14 secret chemicals. Among them are chemicals associated with hormone disruption and allergic reactions, and many substances that have not been assessed for safety in personal care products by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the industry’s own safety panel.

How many secret chemicals do such popular fragrances like Chanel Coco and Old Spice contain? Check out the full report on chemicals in fragrances and you’ll see that Coco has 18 distressing chemicals and Old Spice has 16 ingredients not reported on the label.

In 1973 Congress passed the federal Fair Packaging and Labeling Act. The law, which requires companies to list cosmetics ingredients on the product labels, specifically exempts fragrances. Since then, the vague word “fragrance” is all you’ll find on the label. If there’s anything to be grateful for in this, it’s that “fragrance” is a recognizable word that is easily avoided by label readers.

Personally, I avoid all synthetic “fragrances” whenever possible, including in laundry detergents, shampoos, body products, and non-organic-based candles. I believe most air fresheners are some of the worst toxins that you can add to your environment — and they’re designed to encourage you to smell deeply and carry all those chemicals deep into your lungs.

I think dryer sheets are bad, too, and I encourage you to stop using them as they infuse your clothes with these synthetic fragrances so that you can be continually exposed to these dangerous chemicals each and every day.

The FDA has not assessed the vast majority of these secret fragrance chemicals for safety when used in spray-on personal care products such as fragrances. Most have not even been evaluated by the safety review panel of the International Fragrance Association (IFRA) or any other publicly accountable institution.

Of the chemicals that have been tested, there isn’t a lot of good news. The vague term “fragrance” covers chemicals that can be linked to reproductive damage, hormone disruption, and can trigger allergic reactions.

Fragrances may be designed to make us smell better and feel good about ourselves, but as the EWG points out, “we don’t know how you can feel good when you don’t know what you are putting on your body.”

So what’s a girl to do when she wants to float in a sweet smelling cloud without taxing her body’s tolerance levels?

Chemical perfumes add to the air pollution we breathe in every day. Take steps to minimize your exposure when possible.

Be sure to check out my upcoming post on custom-blended pure aroma perfumes, look for soy or beeswax candles scented with natural tinctures, and consider practicing aromatherapy using only quality uncontaminated oils and tinctures.

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

The contaminated children may have eaten food treated with pesticides, breathed it in the air, or swallowed it in their drinking water. The study didn’t determine how they were exposed. While all children had some quantity of pesticides in their bodies, the ones with ADHD had the highest levels.

It is well known that many commonly used pesticides contain immuno-modulators, endocrine disruptors, and carcinogenic compounds. We live in a world full of these kinds of man-made dangers to our health. It’s good to see that science is finally examining the effects of these toxins on our bodies in a meaningful way.

It all has to do with an individual’s tolerance levels. How much pesticide can this particular child’s body tolerate before the physical effects begin to show up as ADHD? Another child may not be able to tolerate nearly as much as the norm, while still another can tolerate much more without effect. Isn’t this yet another example of how food and chemical sensitivities can manifest differently in different people?

You can lower yours and your child’s pesticide consumption by nearly four-fifths by avoiding the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and instead eating the least contaminated produce, according to the Environmental Working Group’s calculations.

When you eat the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables, you’ll be exposed to an average of 10 pesticides a day. When you choose fresh produce from the 15 least contaminated fruits and vegetables, you’ll consume fewer than 2 pesticides per day.

The Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides ranks pesticide contamination for 50 popular fruits and vegetables based on an analysis of 96,000 tests for pesticides on these foods, conducted from 2000 to 2008 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the federal Food and Drug Administration.

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

Much of this has been blamed on Elvis’ deep-fried, Southern-comfort diet and well-known penchant for opiates. Lots of fatty and highly processed foods mixed with motility-slowing drugs will surely affect a body’s ability to purge, but what if there were other factors as well?

“All the medications he was taking wouldn’t have caused the degree of constipation he had,” claims Dr. Nick, who noted that at the autopsy pathologists found barium in Presley’s stool that had been there for three or four months.

“The nerves have to stimulate the colon to propel the material out,” the Dr. notes. “Either there were no nerves or there was a viral disease that affects the nerves. I’m just using this as an example, but polio, for instance, is a virus that affects the nerves.”

Of course, I have my own theory on the matter. Did you expect anything less?

As much as Dr. Nick is being accused of presenting this theory now as a way to exonerate his role in Elvis’ death as his drug prescriber, I do think he’s spot-on about the nerves of the colon and that they were obviously not functioning in normal peristalsis, the muscular contractions that propel waste matter through the colon and out of the body through the anus.

In a healthy colon, the sensations of peristalsis signal that it is time to get thee to a toilet. In a chronically stopped-up colon, peristalsis slows or ceases completely, and the colon becomes so stretched and distorted that the sensation that you “have to go” is muted or nonexistant.

Many readers of this blog have commented that fiber and water can help clear occasional constipation, and they are correct when you are looking at a normal colon in a healthy person. Adding fiber to a diet can actually  make constipation worse if there is an underlying inflammatory condition that is not being addressed.

In untreated Celiac disease sufferers, for example, the continual and chronic irritation of the lining of the bowels and intestines can cause permanent damage to the nerves and tissues of the gastro-intestinal system, including the sensitive fingerlike villi lining the gut that are responsible for breaking down and absorbing nutrients and assisting peristalsis.

Scientific American magazine reported in the August, 2009, issue that Celiac sufferers and in fact most, if not all, autoimmune disease sufferers, have unusually permeable guts due to constant inflammatory response to environmental substances, i.e., undiagnosed food and chemical sensitivities. Because this inflammation negatively affects the assimilation of nutrients, symptoms can manifest that are as diverse as anemia, arthritis, bone loss, depression, fatigue, infertility, joint pain, seizures, and numbness in the hands and feet. Etcetera, etcetera.

As Celiac patients know, the only  way to heal the bowel and feel better is to eliminate the cause of the inflammation and irritation, in this case gluten in the diet, and allow the tissues to calm down and recover. If identified early enough, the bowel can completely heal and regain normal function. After too many years of continual inflammation, however, the damage may become permanent.

While only 1% of the global population actually suffers from gluten intolerance, the numbers unknowingly afflicted with gluten or other food or chemical additive sensitivities could be exponentially higher. These “Type IV delayed hypersensitivity reactions” spark a histamine/cytokine/chemokine mediator release that can manifest as inflammation localized in the bowels and producing constipation and/or diarreah or as a general system-wide inflammation that can look like anything from migraines to  fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, ADD/ADHD… and on and on.

Perhaps Elvis suffered from undiagnosed food sensitivities that instigated a constant inflammatory response in his colon, effectively closing it to excretions and causing the stool to back-up and expand the colon exponentially in diameter to contain all that rotting fecal matter, and hence lose muscle tone and sensitivity in the villi.

In my experience, once you cross that tolerance threshold for one substance, the thresholds for others drop lower as well, causing a cascade of substances which you can no longer tolerate and so that you become constantly inflamed internally. Returning to a point below these lowered tolerance thresholds takes information, time, and dedication, but it is possible.

What can we learn from these revelations into The King’s toileting life?

First, it’s probably wise to lay off the opiates, especially if you’re already constipated. They’re not going to help.

Second, a deep fried diet laden with processed foods and famous for peanut-butter-banana-and-bacon sandwiches is not conducive to robust health.

And, third, don’t wait until it’s too late to act to save your colon — and your body — from permanent damage like the kind seen in Elvis. Dr. Nick offered Elvis a colonectomy while he was alive in a desperate attempt to find a solution to his chronic problem. Elvis demurred (it would have meant wearing an external colon bag). It’s infinitely more preferable to change your diet than lose your colon, don’t you think?

If you are suffering without finding relief, you might want to consider looking into possible food and/or chemical additive sensitivity issues (not food “allergies” that create IgE antibodies, but “sensitivities” that cause the release of mediators like histamines and cytokines and cause inflammation).

We can’t all be “The King,” but at least we can rule over our own bodies and take control over our own health!

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

There aren’t that many canned goods that we keep in our house anyway… various types of plain organic beans, artichoke hearts, roasted green chiles, tuna, and of course, tomatoes.

I love to use canned tomatoes in my Glorious One-Pot Meals because unlike fresh tomatoes they are delicious regardless of the season, they can add something extra to a recipe that is different from using fresh tomatoes, and they come in convenient sizes that provide the perfect amounts of tomatoes I need for my cooking technique.

So it’s a huge bummer to know that there are BPAs in my canned tomatoes ready to enter into the bodies of my family and accumulate, waiting to wreak havoc with hormones, cancers, and other horrific health problems.

In the US, industry has been fighting a ban on using BPAs like the kinds they have implemented in Europe and Japan.

That’s why it’s such good news that Muir Glen, a General Mills subsidiary, announced it will begin to use BPA-free metal cans with its next harvest. General Mills is not revealing the material it will substitute for BPA, though of course, canning and canned goods existed long before BPA was invented so it is certainly possible to do without it.

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

You might already know that vitamin D is essential for healthy bones and teeth, but did you realize that it plays a role in maintaining a healthy immune system, too?

A connection between Multiple Sclerosis and vitamin D deficiency has been studied for decades. Low blood levels of vitamin D are common among the MS population, and according to recent reports, as many as 80 percent of people with MS don’t get enough of it in their diets.  In fact, current research findings suggest that vitamin D may positively influence the immune systems of patients with MS…

(read the rest of the article on Vitamin D and Multiple Sclerosis here.)

It’s perfect timing for this article as May is the month for many of the annual Walk MS events to raise funds and awareness for multiple sclerosis. This year, the Colorado Chapter of the National MS Society has invited me to host the “Land of Nutrition” at the MS Walks in Denver (May 1), Colorado Springs (May 8), and Boulder (May 15).

As a nutrition expert living with multiple sclerosis, I believe that what you eat plays a role in how you feel, and that your diet affects your health. Changing the course of your health and, at the very least, the severity of your symptoms may be as simple as changing your menu.

Hear me talk more about the National MS Society’s Colorado Walk MS events!

The forecast for the Denver Walk this Saturday (May 1st, 2010) may call for snow (!) so dress warmly and enjoy the coffee and hot chocolate offered around City Park for participants. Take refuge under the Wellness Tent with me, pick up or order an autographed cookbook, and join the discussion on healthy eating!

Hope to see you there!

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

The Nurses Health Study

Analyzing data from 13,535 female participants in the Nurses’ Health Study, researchers correlated reports of physical activity at the average age of 60 years with successful survival into the 70s. Successful survival was defined as “no history of ten major chronic diseases, or coronary artery bypass graft surgery and no cognitive impairment physical impairment, or mental health limitations.”

The correlation was considered strong enough to provide “evidence that higher levels of midlife physical activity are associated with exceptional health status among women who survive to older ages and corroborate the potential role of physical activity in improving overall health.”

Incorporate mental activity to your workout, adds neurologist Tim Vollmer, Co-Director of the Rocky Mountain MS Center Clinic, and keep your brain healthy along with your body.

Although repetitive actions like running are great for your cardiovascular system, coordinated arm leg movements like you find in yoga, pilates, dance, tennis, or my favorite, Jazzercise, can help keep all synapses firing.

Of course, you don’t need to wait until you hit midlife to get the benefits from regular physical and mental activity. The research shows that the old motto “Use it, or lose it!” has been proven to be true.

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

Bloating, gassiness, explosive diarreah, constipation, headache… these can all be symptoms of lactose intolerance, particularly if they show up within 1- 12 hours of ingesting a dairy product.

Lactose intolerance is not fun, to say the least. It’s particularly common among Mediterranean, Asian, African and other dark-skinned people, but can affect almost anyone.

It’s worth noting that mammals didn’t evolve to digest dairy products after weaning, and the human mammal is the only one to continue to drink milk as an adult. Really, lactose intolerance should be no surprise to any of us.

Still, life without cheese makes me feel deprived. Evolution didn’t account for the development of cheese.

Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy

Most lactose intolerant people simply avoid dairy products whenever possible. We can also take the lactase enzyme to help digest milk products on a food-by-food basis, but for me, even though lactase will ease the discomfort of digestion, I don’t believe it does everything it needs to because I notice a direct  correlation between when I consume cow’s milk products and weight gain in my own body.

Not so with goat milk products. Go figure.

Although goat’s milk has only slightly less lactose then cow’s milk (4.1% to 4.7%), something is different enough that many lactose-intolerant people don’t have a problem digesting it. Hooray! This discovery has opened up a whole new world for me and my family because we can have cheese again!

Some cheeses from Mt. Sterling Co-Op Creamery

The coolest part is finding how many products are now made with goat milk. Besides the typical soft Chevre log, we’ve found excellent Cheddar, Country Jack, and Mozzarella. Even our local Costco carries slices of unnamed goat cheese. Look for yogurt made from goat’s milk, too.

Colorado alone has more than 50 goat farms, dairies, and creameries. One of my favorites is the Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy — their cheeses are so delicious and special. Here’s a fun article about a program that puts prisoners to work on goat farms and then the goat milk goes to Haystack.

Mt. Sterling Creamery out of Wisconsin has wonderful harder goat cheeses, too.

(Do you get my newsletter? I send out a new Glorious One-Pot Meal recipe every other week exclusively to subscribers, and today’s recipe includes goat cheese!)

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

A year ago she purchased a Happy Meal and set it on the shelf in her office. Last week, she pulled it back out and snapped a photo of the meal that looks almost identical to the one taken when it was fresh and savory-smelling.

She was amazed that this “food” sat on a shelf for a year and didn’t attract mice or ants. It seems to have dehydrated more than decomposed.

It kinda makes you wonder what kinds of preservatives you need to add to make food not decompose, doesn’t it? Can you help but wonder what happens to your body when it absorbs those kinds of preservatives?

Embalmed from the inside out. Now there’s a disgusting thought.

fresh Happy Meal ~ March 3, 2009

Same Happy Meal Marcy 3, 2010

©2010 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.