Find Organic Locally Grown Food in your area!

Local Harvest
http://www.localharvest.org/

The best organic food is what's grown closest to you. Use our website to find farmers' markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area, where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats, and many other goodies. Want to support this great web site? Shop in our catalog for things you can't find locally!

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The Cell Phone Industry Has a Nasty Secret That They've Known About For Some Time...
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Why it Doesn't Pay to Get Straight A's in College
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Sunlight May Save Kids' Sight
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How to Eliminate America's Addiction to Oil
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Lawsuit Against Splenda Moves Forward
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Losing Your Hearing? Here's How to Restore Your Hearing Naturally
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Wake Up America -- Open Your Eyes
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Thousands Have Gotten Sick from Gardasil HPV Vaccine
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Is Honey More Effective Than Cough Medicine?
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Your Ultimate Personal Vitamin D System
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Cell Phones Can Literally Kill You
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How to Flush Away Sinus Ills
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Ridiculously Funny Medical Stories
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Doctors Are Clueless About Medication for Kids
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African Plant Helps Fight Fat
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Ron Paul Interview With Wolf Blitzer
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Are You at Risk of Sunlight Starvation?
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One of the Most Bizarre Faces You Will Ever See
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Update on Raw Almond Controversy
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How to Properly Use a Kitchen Knife
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Finally -- Explanations for Many Optical Illusions
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Solar Energy Soon to be Cheaper Than Coal
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Parents Told to Get Kids Vaccinated or Go to Jail
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Health Tips 13

A Brew for Better Blood Sugar

Your daily cup of java may do more than get you going and out the door. It might also reduce your risk for blood sugar disorders.

Research shows that coffee might decrease the risk of developing diabetes by about 25 percent. But watch the sugar. Here's why.

Make It Black
People who add sugar to coffee or tea don't get the protective blood sugar effect, and they may run a higher risk of developing cancer of the pancreas. That's because the risk of developing pancreatic cancer is related, in part, to the amount of sugar in the diet. People who drink fizzy or syrup-based sweet drinks twice a day or more have a 90 percent higher risk of getting cancer of the pancreas than those who never drink them. Suddenly, that sweet stuff doesn't seem so sweet! (Here's another reason to avoid sodas.)

Caffeine Caution
Coffee isn't for everyone. If you're sensitive to caffeine's effects, you may want to avoid it. And even if you aren't, it's best to limit yourself to about 250 milligrams of caffeine a day.

Blueberry Fields Forever!

Think berries of the blue variety and your mental brawn could go on and on.

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Potent Polyphenols
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Nuts to Cancer

f you're not already snacking on a handful of nuts daily to help protect your heart, here's a reason that might sway you.

Walnuts, almonds, and pistachios contain a potent substance that may thwart cancerous tumors. Legumes are similarly loaded with the mighty compound, so there's no reason to leave those peanuts at the bottom of the can of mixed nuts.

A Tongue-Twisting Treat
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More Nutty Nutrients
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Vote in the National Online Primary

If you haven't yet go and cast your vote:

http://www.USPrimary2008.com

Forward this site far and wide!

Groups release guide to toxins in toys

By JEFF KAROUB, AP Business Writer Wed Dec 5, 12:04 AM ET

DETROIT - Tests on more than 1,200 children's products, most of them still on store shelves, found that 35 percent contain lead — many with levels far above the federal recall standard used for lead paint.

A Hannah Montana card game case, a Go Diego Go! backpack and Circo brand shoes were among the items with excessive lead levels in the tests performed by a coalition of environmental health groups across the country.

Only 20 percent of the toys and other products had no trace of lead or harmful chemicals, according to the results being released Wednesday by the Michigan-based Ecology Center along with the national Center for Health, Environment and Justice and groups in eight other states.

Of the 1,268 items tested, 23 were among millions of toys recalled this year.

Mattel Inc. recalled more than 21 million Chinese-made toys on fears they were tainted with lead paint and tiny magnets that children could accidentally swallow. Mattel's own tests on the toys found that they had lead levels up to 200 times the accepted limit.

The Consumer Action Guide to Toxic Chemicals in Toys, which is available to the public at http://www.healthytoys.org, shows how the commonly purchased children's products rank in terms of containing lead, cadmium, arsenic and other harmful chemicals. It comes in time for holiday shopping — and amid the slew of recalls.

"This is not about alarming parents," said Tracey Easthope, director of the Ecology Center's Environmental Health Project. "We're just trying to give people information because they haven't had very much except these recall lists."

Easthope said 17 percent of the children's products tested had levels of lead above the 600 parts per million federal standard that would trigger a recall of lead paint. Jewelry products were the most likely to contain the high levels of lead, the center said, with 33.5 percent containing levels above 600 ppm. Among the toys that tested above that limit was a Hannah Montana Pop Star Card Game, whose case tested at 3,056 ppm.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a level of 40 ppm of lead as the maximum that should be allowed in children's products. Lead poisoning can cause irreversible learning disabilities and behavioral problems and, at very high levels, seizures, coma, and even death.

A spokeswoman for New York-based Cardinal Industries Inc., which sells the Hannah Montana game, said Tuesday that Cardinal was unaware of the environmental groups' tests or procedures but the product has passed internal tests.

"We test every (product) before it ships numerous times," Bonnie Canner said. "We have not tested this product high for lead."

Easthope said the product is manufactured in China. Canner declined further comment until she had more information.

The center and its testing partners found The First Years brand First Keys, Fisher-Price's Rock-a-Stack and B.R. Bruin's Stacking Cups were among the 20 percent that contained none of the nine chemicals.

"There's a lot of doom and gloom about lead in the products — people only hear about the recalls," said Jeff Gearhart, the Ecology Center's campaign director. "Companies can make clean products. Our sampling shows that there's no reason to put lead in a product."

Gearhart and Easthope said the products, while not necessarily representative of everything on the market, were considered among those commonly bought and used. Testers purchased most at major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us and Babies "R" Us.

The testing began in 2006 but most of the items were checked in the past six months, Gearhart said.

Calls to a Mattel spokeswoman were not immediately returned Tuesday. A Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman declined to comment because the company had not seen the report.

Toys "R" Us Inc. spokeswoman Kathleen Waugh also declined to comment because she needed to fully review the report's findings, referring questions to the Toy Industry Association.

Joan Lawrence, the association's vice president of standards and safety, said the group and its members support limiting accessible lead in children's products. But she said the industry and standard-setting bodies are struggling with how to measure exposure, accessibility and what limits to set.

She said she hasn't seen all of the Ecology Center's findings but called them misleading because the testers did not appear to follow recognized test procedures for lead and other substances. The two most common ways are to use solutions to simulate saliva and digestion, and another to attempt to dissolve the surface coating.

The center and its testing partners performed what they describe as a "screening" of chemicals using a handheld X-ray fluorescence device that detects surface chemical elements.

"The mere presence of any substance alone is only half of the answer — you need to know if it's accessible to the child," Lawrence said. "We can't tell that from what I know of the tests that have been done by this group."

Easthope said her group's tests aren't meant to replace those tests, and that's noted on the Web site. She said it's important for people to know what's in these products since nobody else is providing this data.

"We're not saying that ... all of it will come out into a child," she said. "We're saying it's a concern that so much of these products have these chemicals of concern in them.

"We shouldn't have lead in kids' products. We can make products without lead in them."

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman Scott Wolfson said he also hasn't seen the Ecology Center's tests but said the federal agency would seek to verify its findings and initiate recalls if warranted.

He said the commission has been meeting with ASTM International, which spearheads voluntary safety standards for toys, to discuss crafting standards specific to lead in plastics. He said there also is movement on Capitol Hill to revise laws on lead in children's products.

Wolfson said the commission launched 40 toy recalls in fiscal year 2006, three involving lead-paint violations. In 2007, there were 61 recalls, 19 involving lead-paint violations.

"What we would like to consumers to know is more recalls are on the way," he said.

___

On the Net:

The Consumer Action Guide to Toxic Chemicals in Toys: http://www.healthytoys.org

Toy Industry Association: http://www.toyassociation.org

List of recalled toys available at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission: http://www.cpsc.gov

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Get your own $180 laptop -- if you donate a second one in the One Laptop Per Child project

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2007, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2007, The Post-Standard

The only thing Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project couldn't manage was the price. His plan to build millions of laptops for kids in poor nations is doing very well otherwise.
And even that one slip-up in financial planning can be forgiven. In 1995, when Negroponte announced his plan to build enough cheap laptops so that every needy kid in the world could own one, his target price seemed ridiculous -- $100 per laptop, only 5 percent of what a typical laptop cost back then.
Inflation and the cost of manufacturing pushed the price to almost double the original goal. But even at $180, the cute little XO computers are a bargain unlike anything I've seen before. They're so rugged they're rain- and dust-proof, drop-proof and child-proof. They have built-in networking, last a long time on batteries alone, have a non-Microsoft operating system, ensuring better reliability, and can run off literally any kind of power source.
They even have a solar recharger.
Before Negroponte started the One Laptop Per Child project, he ran the MIT Media Laboratory and was widely hailed as a visionary who would help guide the future of technology. But he gave technology a kick in the pants with the laptop project.
Negroponte knew that kids can't be trusted to take good care of laptops, so he decided to make a laptop that could take all kinds of abuse. There's more: By making the new laptop so cheap that it could be given away, he got rid of the argument against letting kids handle anything expensive in the first place.
Starting Monday, you'll be able to buy an XO laptop for yourself -- as long as you buy one for a poor child in a developing nation. This makes sure Americans can't snap up the supply and keep kids who really need these laptops from getting them.
To get one while giving one, go to www.xogiving.org and click the "Donate" button. You'll be charged $400 for the two laptops, plus shipping. If you really don't want an XO laptop for yourself, you can pay $200 to have one sent to a child. You can donate more, of course, with each $200 paying for a laptop. All donations are tax-deductible.
The project points out that the XO laptop was designed specifically with children in mind:
"The XO's screen can be viewed as clearly as a newspaper in broad daylight, and the wireless range of the XO is several times longer than your average laptop," the project says.
The laptop comes with a Web browser that's based on Firefox, a document viewer, the AbiWord word processor, an e-mail program, an instant-messaging program, a journal, multimedia authoring and playback software, a music composition suite, graphics software and games. The operating system is Linux.