Monday, September 27, 2010

FORMULA RECALL


Consumer Updates: Abbott Recalls Some Similac Formulas

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Review of Annmarie Gianni organic skin care product line

Review of Annmarie Gianni organic skin care product line

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

American Drug Addiction

Does this sound extreme? It's actually more typical than you might imagine. It has been noted that 50% of Americans are taking some type of Pharmaceutical. The problem is not that every drug is bad-the problem is that these drugs are being created so fast that there is not enough research done to know what the long-term affects are. You may notice that right after the long, artsy pharmaceutical drug commercial, you see an advertisement by a law firm asking if you had taken the last "pop" pill and have "cancer, cerebral palsey, brain damage, stroke, death, or any other adverse reaction imaginable.
These drugs are widely advertised and promoted (why would anyone advertise medication?), given in doctors offices like candy (even free-in the form of samples), and everyone is profiting. Everyone except for the victims whose health issues show up months or even years later.
I think the only safe answer is just that-play it safe: Just say NO to drugs!

There are certainly times when taking medication is beneficial, but those times (in my opinion) do not apply to colds, flus, heart burn, weight gain, mild allergies and so many other symptoms that are your body's natural way of crying out and telling you that there is a bigger issue at hand. We are a culture of "no pain is acceptable" and we want to kill the symptom instead of finding out the source and looking for a cure. It is like "putting a band-aid on cancer", and the band-aid is a toxic chemical.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Got Bedbugs?


I keep hearing about bedbugs lately. On the news, twitter, blogs; it seems that bedbugs are arriving in massive numbers-planning some giant bug party that none of us have been warned about!

None of the solutions to bed bugs are pleasant. Throwing away furniture, paying professionals to search your bed & furniture crevices, spraying toxic chemicals all over your home, not to mention the sleepless nights and/or bug-bitten skin!

Ok, so it all sounds horribly expensive and time consuming. But I am here to solve your problems :) I will say something that sounds quite different from what people have been saying... "BED BUGS ARE NOT HARD TO GET RID OF!"

The reason I can say that is because we had them. We lived in an apartment building with 1100 units, so about 2000 or more people lived there. They had the exterminators search the apartments for bed bugs but they never found any in our place so they didn't treat for them. This was lucky for us in fact because we had a cat, dog & baby in the belly, so we didn't need to deal with having chemicals that kill sprayed all over our stuff.

When we bought our house & moved we noticed that we were getting bitten at night, so I looked up bed bugs to learn about searching for them. I inspected our mattress and found nothing, but when I took our bedframe apart, I found the buggers in the particle board in our bed frame. I threw out our mattress, bed frame, and upon inspecting our side table lamps and side tables, I had to throw those out too :(

Ok, so this is sounding macabre, I know. Loss of furniture is always a bummer. I steam cleaned our rugs and vacuumed daily hoping that I had gotten rid of them for good. I was not sure but I didn't want to hire an exterminator (lots of money & very dangerous chemicals, no thanks).

Then I found a cure! Cedar oil is the tried and true natural essential oil that has been used to combat bugs bugs forever. I read lots of articles about it and bought a bottle (expensive for oil, cheap compared to the alternatives). I mixed a spray bottle of oil with a little bit of water and sprayed daily.
I was still so nervous about another outbreak that my research continued. Then, I stumbled upon an amazing product that we immediately ordered and used. A company called Cedarcide created this great potion which uses mostly cedar oil as a base and it is totally non-toxic to animals and humans. They sell a fogger machine that you can fill with the solution and fog your home.
We bought it, fogged our house, and have never seen a bed bug since. That was about a year ago!

Here is the info, I highly recommend it:

www.cedarcidestore.com