Weird, I know.

You see, my dog has a lot of, er… issues. By the time I adopted her, she had lived on the streets of East St. Louis for three months, bounced through eight different foster homes, and had one failed adoption - all before her first birthday.

Dealing with her emotional baggage has become a big part of my life. Since she doesn’t find pets, praise, or ordinary dog treats very motivating, I’ve had to get more creative in my training. One food she finds really motivating are canned sardines.

Before I got this dog, I had never eaten a sardine. Once my pantry was stocked with at least a dozen tins of sardines - an option I knew was more sustainable and lower in mercury than the neighboring cans of tuna - it was inevitable that I would get curious.

I’ve since become a convert, and it looks I’m not the only one focusing on the sardine as a greener seafood option.

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Lead is a metal found in the earth’s crust. However, due to human activity such as mining, burning fossil fuels and manufacturing, it has become more widespread. Lead is also toxic. Lead poisoning occurs when lead builds up in the body over time. At very high levels lead can be fatal; but even in small amounts it can cause serious health problems, particularly in children under the age of 6 who can develop mental and physical impairments.

Lead emitted into the air can be inhaled or can be ingested after it settles out of the air. Lead particles that settle in soil can last for years, which continues to be a major problem, particularly around highways and urban settings. Because they are more likely to ingest lead and their bodies are developing rapidly, children are most susceptible to lead exposure. There is no known safe level of lead in the body.

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Seafood is often called brain food. It’s a good source of many different nutrients, including long chain omega-3 fatty acids. Eating fish — or taking fish oil supplements — has been linked to a number of cardiovascular and neurological benefits. For this reason, most health experts and the U.S. government’s dietary guidelines encourage people to eat more seafood.

However, a new study in the journal of the Canadian Medical Association calls this recommendation into question, contending that the health benefits of omega-3’s have potentially been oversold while the ocean’s ability to provide them is failing.

The bottom line? The jury is still out on how much fish we should eat, so making eco-friendly choices is essential.

The study’s authors accurately point out that the oceans can no longer provide us with fish (and fish oil) at the current pace. Barely one-quarter of U.S. fisheries are known to be sustainably fished, and the United Nations reports that 80 percent of the world’s fisheries are now either fully fished (i.e. incapable of providing more) or overexploited.

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Breast milk is the best food for babies.

Or is it?

Nursing your baby has numerous benefits, including decreased risks for allergies, diabetes, cancer, infections, and arthritis.

Colostrum, which comes in before the milk does, is the first food a newborn gets, and it passes on antibodies (immunoglobulin A) and leukocytes (which destroy disease-causing bacteria and viruses), and it also seals the infant’s highly permeable digestive tract with a barrier which prevents foreign substances from penetrating it. It is a safe and natural vaccine, the way that nature intended it.

However, pesticides, heavy metals, and other persistent organic pollutants accumulate in human milk, leading some researchers to question whether the risks of exposure to pollutants in breast milk outweigh the benefits.

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Pittsburgh, PA.  A place known for its peoples’ good ol’ blue collar fervor, our enthusiasm for everything from our football team (STEELERS!!) to our beer (Iron City) to our hoagies (Primanti’s, brother!).  We are thus naturally inclined to encourage bombastic public demonstrations of our affection–in this case, in celebrating ourselves!

I viewed the record-setting Pittsburgh 250 fireworks display from a wonderful vantage point on the North Shore, as I cheered my city on from the balcony of McFadden’s with a massive group of Couchsurfers visiting Pittsburgh for their regional meet-up weekend.  All the while I was marvelling at the bright splashes and the thundering bursts–thirty minutes in duration!–the thought kept flitting across my mind: “what exactly is IN that massive smoke cloud pooling across the river?”

The Composition of Fireworks, a page compiled by Reema Gondhia at Imperial College in London, gives you the factual rundown of the makeup of fireworks.  A firework’s chemical arrangement, however ingeniously designed to manifest our titillating visual delights, provides some unsettling names–chemicals with long rap sheets from research institutions indicating their threat to living systems.  Read on for some distrubing examples.

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Truth: You are being ripped off, and then poisoned, by drinking bottled water from unknown sources.

Recently found in bottled drinking water: Trihalomethanes, Haloacetic acids, Nitrates, Ammonia, Acetaldehyde, Hexane, Toluene, bacterial contamination, Arsenic, radioactivity contamination (and more…)

Not the sort of chemical cocktail you had in mind when you bought bottled water at the grocery store, now is it?

The results of a two year study by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) were recently released, detailing the lab tests of 10 brands of bottled drinking water from 8 different states in the US.

The report is shocking.

38 different chemical pollutants were detected, with an average of 8 contaminants per brand. One-third of the chemicals they found are not even regulated in drinking water. Some brands, like Sam’s Choice (Wal Mart) and Acadia (Giant) contained cancer-causing chemicals at levels exceeding the standards for safety set by the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986.

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