Heart attack and stroke in a can. Here’s an interesting study on diet soda that’s followed almost 2,600 older adults for a decade. They found that those who drank diet soda every day were 44 percent more likely than non-drinkers to suffer a heart attack or stroke.
Diet soda tied to heart attack, stroke risks: study | The Raw Story.
Hi all you animal lovers, it’s the roving, sniffing reporter here to give you a few tips and solutions to some of mine and your pet problems. At one time or another all pet owners have to take their family pet for a car ride. It could be a trip to the vet or a family vacation. We dogs might get yappy and jumpy; and cats start to meow, whine, and in general get agitated and tense. Try spraying the seat, cover, or crate with a mixture of water and three drops of Roman chamomile essential oil before we get in the car. The aroma of the oil will help keep us calm (saving you from distraction). The bonus is the scent will help you feel at ease too, and your car will smell fantastic.
Does your pooch slobber all over your furniture and floors just when you’ve finished cleaning? I know I sometimes slobber, especially when I see food. A simple solution is to tie a bandana around your dog’s neck. The cloth accessory will catch any slobber before it hits the floor and furniture, plus the bandana is easy to wash and reuse. I look so smart in a bandana and so will your pet.
Just as your hands get chapped and cracked so do our paw pads (especially in the winter months). The help remedy: once a week wash and dry our paws, microwave 2 teaspoons of grape seed oil for 15 seconds, and massage the oil into our paw pads. The oil’s skin-repairing antioxidants and linoleic acid will heal and protect so we can walk pain-free.
Everyone gets red, itchy, and irritated skin in winter because we have to stay indoors. Well we pets are no different and you might see us itching and licking ourselves more than usual, but chamomile tea can help. Simply brew a cup of chamomile tea and chill it in the refrigerator, then pour it into a spray bottle and mist our dry skin three or four times a day (your cats are going to just hate this). Chamomile contains natural ant-inflammatory compounds that will calm irritated skin and leaves our fur soft and shiny.
Tune in for more ideas and solutions for your pets!
I found Tomatoland quite informative. It should make anyone who reads it down right angry, I know it did me. Estabrook explains how all those perfect tasteless tomatoes reach the supermarket shelves in winter and how enslaved workers get them there. Who knew that in 21st century America people are being held against their will as slaves. I’m sure we will be seeing more of this as the corporations take more and more control of our country and our lives.
What the Publisher Says
Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award–winning article, “The Price of Tomatoes,”investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but produces fruits with a fraction of the calcium, Vitamin A, and Vitamin C, and fourteen times as much sodium as the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point?
Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation’s top restaurants.
Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a Who’s Who cast of characters in the tomato industry: The avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the United States attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents’ medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years.
Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit and an exposé of today’s agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.
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