Creating Better Habits

Small Changes Do Make a Difference

My friend and fellow writer Daylle Deanna Schwartz blogs over at Lessons from a Recovering Doormat. Daylle started The Creating Better Habits Challenge, which is open to any blogger who wants to tackle the challenge's topic: how to break a habit and replace it with one—big or small—that can lead to improvement in some aspect of life.

In developing the challenge, Daylle tagged ten other bloggers, including me, to write on the topic. We get to tag other people. And, hopefully, all these bloggers send a little ripple of conversation through cyberdom.

About Those Better Habits

I often hear from people that all the environmental health news is so bad that they feel overwhelmed. Why bother trying to change; something’s going to kill me. But one thing we know about exposures is that they are cumulative. Reducing your exposure now doesn’t reduce the burden of your past exposures, but does reduce those cumulative impacts, which in turn reduces your chance of getting sick from environmental exposures. It all adds up!

Habits. We all have them, and they contribute to our exposures. We put on potions and lotions and fragrances after we bathe. Or swing into the coffee shop in the morning and grab a to-go cup of joe in a disposable cup. We grab a bottle of water from the convenience store cooler. And on, and on, and on.

How do we change habits: By becoming conscious. By actually stopping to think about what we are doing. Once you start thinking about your habits, you can begin to change.

When I first started researching environmental health issues four or five years ago, I still had a plastic to-go coffee cup that I’d take with me when on the road. I switched it for a stainless steel one. I’m a klutz, so I have never kept a glass of water on my desk, but used a polycarbonate water bottle. That bottle got retired to store rubber bands, paper clips, and the miscellaneous detritus that most of us accumulate around our desks, and I use a glass bottle with a lid. The pleasant surprise: water actually tastes better out of a glass bottle, and it stays colder longer.

Next, I looked around my kitchen at the collection of plastic storage stuff—the Tupperware, and the recycled yogurt containers, and the baggies. I had ball jars in the cabinets. I had nice ceramic bowls. I started using these for food storage, and sent 99% of that plastic stuff to recycle.

Even before I’d started my research, my personal grooming regime had begun to shift. I was already using some organic or natural products, but I was also using a lot of mainstream cosmetics and grooming products. I began reevaluating the products I used. Some got tossed. Some got used up, but once gone, I purchased healthier alternatives. Now my grooming choices mirror my food choices: they are as clean and green as possible.

Again, my cleaning product choices were already shifting when I started looking into the connections between the stuff around us and our health, but my research made me finalize the shift. I went old-fashioned (see “tips”) taking a cue from my grandmother’s generation. They depended on things such as baking soda and borax, or plain old soap and vinegar, aided by a little elbow grease. Another pleasant surprise: it takes damn little elbow grease with these old standards.

I always tended to use a wired headset when using my cell phone if the call was going to go long. I did it not because I was trying to protect myself from radio-frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs), but because the cell phone’s heat was uncomfortable on my ear. Now I’m glad about that accidental decision. Most of my phone time is when I’m sitting at my desk working. I used to have a cordless phone here. When I began reading about EMFs, I went out and bought a regular old corded phone for my desk. I still have the cordless in the living room, and will use it once in a while, but most of my phone time is now on the corded phone again.

None of these were painful, hard, or expensive changes. They just took becoming conscious, and breaking what I now see as bad habits. You too can become conscious, you can break those habits. It is worth the change, worth becoming clean and green, for you and your family.

And tag to:

Sharon at Out in the World. Sharon is blogging of her travels in a national park in India. Her trip and her blog are truly inspirational. I think she has seen things that will have a lasting impact on her habits.

Judy at Living Green, Living Well. Judy always has some really great and practical ideas on green living.

Plastic Problems

Recently I did a two-part podcast with KMO at C-Realm on backyard poultry and toxic burden. During the interview I mentioned some of the potential health issues associated with plastic water bottles. I particularly mentioned bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in hard plastics, such as the polycarbonate water bottles that so many people carry today.

BPA is an endocrine disrupting chemical, implicated in a variety of things that are troubling us. The evidence is especially strong that it causes fetal toxicity, which can result in either miscarriage or still birth. It's also connected with reduced conception, usually caused by low sperm counts or abnormal sperm production in men and/or menstrual disorders in women, and several developmental disorders and birth defects. Two that I heard a lot about while attending a conference* this year are chryptorchism (undescended testicles), and hypospadia, a condition in which the opening in the penis is along the shaft, rather than at the tip. Hypospadia, the now the second most common congenital birth defect, having increased in frequency 300% in just the last 30 years.



After hearing the podcast, one of KMO's listeners sent an email asking, "So does this go for all plastic water bottles (like the kind used for mountain bikes too?) I also send my kids to school with water bottles, so I wonder what a good substitute for those would be. I guess metal since glass could get broken."

I decided to answer the listener's question here:

First, as far as BPA goes, it is in polycarbonate plastics (which has a number 7 in the recycle mark). That includes most of the plastic water bottles like bikers use. The other common plastic bottles (that soda, juice, and water usually come in) are a softer plastic than polycarbonate. Known as PETE (for polyethylene terephthalate, and recognized by number 1 in the recycle mark), these plastics don't contain BPA, but do contain phthalates, another plasticisizing chemical that is associated with many of the same problems as BPA.

What can you do? Reduce your exposures to these chemicals (and especially your children's exposures). How? Start by choosing glass and steel when those options are available. For example, for hot or cold drinks that you carry with you, try stainless steel containers that aren't resin coated on the inside. Check Kleen Kanteen.

Some years ago, I also consciously switched from using plastic for most food storage, to using lots more glass for food storage. Ball jars (the canning jars of yore) are great for storing left overs of all kinds in the fridge — you can see what's in them, and they really do seal well. The tops can be reused hundreds of times when the food is in the fridge (unlike when they are actually used for canning purposes). I use them for storing almost every kind of food imaginable, including cheese, meat, and raw veggies. If you look in my fridge, about the only plastic you normally see is bread in its plastic bag.

Coming tomorrow: Part 2 of what you can do to reduce exposures!

* The conference was co-sponsored by the Collaborative on Health and Environment and the School of Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. The Summit on Environmental Challenges to Reproductive Health, was held in January, 2007 at UCSF.