Living a sustainable lifestyle can be easy. Each simple action makes a positive impact today, tomorrow, and for generations to come. Here are some ideas that don’t require a dramatic lifestyle change. Remember that every little effort helps:
 | Reduce Water Bottle Consumption – Americans consumed 50 billion single serve water bottles in one year and on average, only two out of ten bottles were recycled. Instead, choose from Tupperware’s wide range of durable drinking containers and pitchers for on the go or at home. | | Replace Plastic Wrap with Tupperware® Containers - Two million tons of plastic wrap and over 1.5 tons of plastic bags end up in landfills each year. Tupperware’s durable, versatile storage products last virtually forever and offer a sustainable, reusable option for preserving food and the planet. |
| Use the Microwave - Microwaving helps conserve 50% more energy during cooking and reheating than a traditional oven. Tupperware’s microwave safe products help save time and energy. | | Use Your Own Coffee Container - A Tupperware® commuter mug is a much better choice than a Styrofoam cup. Styrofoam does not degrade and will linger forever in a landfill. Don’t forget to bring your Tupperware® commuter mug to your local coffee shop and avoid the disposable cups. |
| Buy in Bulk - Buy in large sizes and save money, reduce waste, and help the environment. A family of four in the United States alone can save approximately $2,000 a year by choosing large sizes. Tupperware offers a number of storage solutions for keeping your bulk foods fresh longer. | | Preserve your Fruits & Vegetables - Almost 10% of the food purchased at supermarkets ends up in landfills—more than 21 million shopping bags of food! Many of Tupperware’s fridge containers have been specifically developed with technology to preserve your foods, helping you reduce waste and save money. |
| Tupperware® Product Returns - If you decide to part with your old Tupperware® products, return it rather than throwing it away. | | Make one less car trip a week - It will be easier on your wallet and the environment. Walk or ride your bike when possible. Consider shops and restaurants closer to home. And remember that a Tupperware Party can be happening in your own neighborhood. |
| Give your old cell phone new life - Donation boxes are located in stores in most communities, and the cell phones are distributed to soldiers, women in shelters, and others in need. 125 million cell phones are thrown away every year, creating 65,000 tons of waste. | | Use fluorescent bulbs - In the United States alone, if every house used fluorescent bulbs, the energy savings would be equivalent to taking one million cars off the streets. |
| Use both sides of the paper - Over four million tons of office paper are discarded every year. That’s enough to build a 12 foot-high wall of paper equaling 2500 miles or 3800 km. Use both sides for printing, and then recycle. | | Share Your Magazines - Take them to libraries, hospitals, or schools where they are needed and appreciated. Most of the magazines printed, almost 8 million tons, end up in landfills each year. |
| Turn in your junk mail - Take it to your local recycling location. The Environmental Protection Agency has found that making paper from recycled materials results in 74% less air pollution and 35% less water pollution. | | Recycle glass - Contact your local recycling location to make a difference. A recycled glass bottle saves enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours. |
| Turn off computers at night - Don't just put them in hibernation mode. Computers in the business sector unnecessarily waste $1 billion worth of electricity a year. | | Buy recycled and re-manufactured toner and ink cartridges - Each re-manufactured toner cartridge keeps approximately 2.5 pounds of metal and plastic out of landfills and conserves about a half gallon of oil. |
| Plant a tree - Add trees and shrubs to your landscaping. They help absorb noise and sunlight in addition to creating additional oxygen and improving air quality around your home. | | Conserve water- Conservation is the most cost-effective and environmentally sound way to reduce demand for water. Don't let the faucet run while you clean vegetables - Rinse them in a Tupperware® strainer and save 150 to 250 gallons a month. While you’re saving on your water bill, you will also be saving energy. |
| Don't let the faucet run while you clean vegetables - Rinse them in a Tupperware® strainer and save 150 to 250 gallons a month. While you’re saving on your water bill, you will also be saving energy. | | Use the cold setting on your washing machine - If you use warm water and a dryer, you could be producing a staggering 715 kilograms of greenhouse gas. That number is substantially reduced when using cold water. |
| Dry multiple loads one right after the other - The dryer is already hot, so you’ll end up using less energy and saving money. | | Adjust the thermostat - Every degree lower in the winter or higher in the summer translates into a 10% decrease on your energy bill and places less strain on energy resources |
| Drive smart - Make a list of errands and group them before you leave home. Planning trips allows you to save fuel, which conserves a resource and saves you money and time. | | Check tire pressure - Tires at the wrong pressure, especially ones that are low, are a big fuel waster. This is a simple, cost-free way to reduce your gas expenses along with greenhouse emissions. |
| Replace appliances with energy efficient ones - A new refrigerator uses half the energy of an older one and saves as much as $100 a year. New energy efficient water heaters are 50% more efficient than older models | | Give old things a second life - Take things that you are not going to wear or use and give it to a charity or someone who will use it. An unbelievable amount of books, shoes, and clothing in perfect condition end up in landfills. |
| Switch off the lights any time you leave a room for more the 15 minutes - In a typical home, lighting accounts for 20% of the electricity bill, so if you can cut back here you will save money while preserving a resource. | | Go paperless - Get your statements and pay your bills online. If every house in one country did this, 18 million trees would be saved each year. |
| Use a reusable coffee filter - Coffee filters are white because they are bleached. The process of bleaching paper is responsible for creating dioxin, a deadly toxin that gets dumped into our waterways. Billions of bleached coffee filters are thrown away every year after one use. | | Paint your house with lighter colors - The hotter the roof, the hotter the rooms below it. Light colored roofing and/or reflective coatings reflect radiant energy. Darker colors can increase cooling bills in the summer months by 20 percent. |
| Cover your pots and kettles when boiling water - Covering your Tupperware® cookware brings water to a boil faster, using less energy. You save money and reduce energy consumption. | | Hit reverse on your ceiling fan in the winter - The fan will bring hot air down to mix with cooler air at floor level to equalize the temperature at floor and ceiling levels. The heating system will not need to run as often, and your savings could be significant. |
| Keep the oven door closed while cooking - While it’s tempting to sneak a peek, opening the door releases more energy and lowers the temperature by as much as 25 degrees. | | Reduce idling in your vehicle - Except at a traffic signal or in slow traffic, turn your engine off if you're going to be stopped for more than ten seconds. Idling your engine for more than ten seconds uses more gas than turning your engine off and starting it again. |
| Change your furnace air filters once a month in the winter - The heater uses more energy when it is full of dust; this is an easy way to cut your bill and save energy. | | Non-disposable alternative to cleaning - Tupperware’s range of environmentally safe cleaning cloths offers a long term solution rather then using and throwing away paper towels. |
| Bring your own Tupperware® Products - When dining out, bring your Tupperware® container for leftovers instead of using the restaurant’s plastic or Styrofoam containers. | | Add a plant to your home decor - Houseplants add color and they act as filters by removing toxins from the air. For the best results, try chrysanthemums, English ivy, peace lilies, philodendrons or spider plants. |
| Install low-flow shower heads - Low-flow shower heads reduce water by an average of five gallons per minute, saving over 5,400 gallons a year. | | Say no to paper or plastic bags - Switch to reusable high quality cloth grocery bags and offset significant environmental harm and eliminate a portion of our waste stream. Fourteen plastic bags contain enough petroleum to drive a car one mile. Paper bags do not biodegrade in landfills due to lack of oxygen. |
| Pass the word - Many people just don’t understand the seriousness of environmental issues impacting our world today. However, taking simple steps everyday each of us can make a difference. Tupperware is focused on providing product solutions to reduce waste and provide alternatives that preserve the future. |
If a new report is to be believed, an entire generation of children has grown up drinking a toxic chemical from their earliest months: bisphenol A. A consortium of North American environmental and health groups released a paper Thursday showing that many major-brand baby bottles leach bisphenol A, and is now calling for a moratorium on the use of the compound — used to make polycarbonate plastic — in food and beverage containers.
Researchers tested 19 baby bottles purchased in nine U.S. states and Canada. Bottle brands included Avent, Dr. Brown, Evenflo, Disney, Gerber and Playtex. When the bottles were heated to 175 degrees F (80 degrees C), every one of them leached bisphenol A at about 5 to 7 parts per billion. The report also suggested that because of the chemical makeup of bisphenol A, it may leach more in fatty or acidic liquids, such as milk or apple juice, than in water.
It's a parent's nightmare. But before you panic, consider this: U.S. and E.U. health and environment authorities still stand behind polycarbonate plastic, putting the safe level of daily bisphenol A exposure at more than 25 times the levels found in baby bottles. (The Canadian agency, Health Canada, is currently reviewing its bisphenol A policy; conclusions are due in May.)
So who's right? Opponents of bisphenol A say official safety figures are far too high, given what the chemical, which mimics the hormone estrogen in the body, does in animals. In the lab, even low exposure levels — adjusted for body weight — have been linked to a variety of sex-hormone-imbalance effects, including breast and prostate cancer, early puberty, miscarriage, low sperm count, and immune-system changes. Critics also claim that in developing infants, such sex-hormone effects may come into play at exposure levels far below what health authorities have deemed safe for adults. "The reproductive system is developing, the brain is developing, the immune system is developing," David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, told a news conference Thursday on behalf of the environmental agencies. Knowing that, he said, it is "absolutely obscene" to expose infants to the compound. Legislation has been proposed in several U.S. states to limit or ban the use bisphenol A. And a handful of stores, including Whole Foods and Patagonia, have yanked polycarbonate bottles from their shelves.
Still, the scientific establishment disagrees. In a 2006 summary explaining its review of bisphenol A safety, the European Food Safety Authority argued that animal trials of the chemical simply don't tell us very much about humans. For one thing, when humans ingest the compound, it's quickly excreted through the urine; when rats and mice eat it, it's released into the bloodstream and remains in the body much longer — with much more time to throw off the body's sex-hormone balance, causing nasty effects.
So far, the human data on bisphenol A have been "really inconclusive," says Antonia Calafat, a research chemist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing a lack of big quality studies testing the chemical's effects in humans. In order to prove definitively that bisphenol A is not harmful to people, researchers would need to conduct large, lengthy trials, such as those that finally concluded that thimerosal-containing vaccines do not cause autism in children. That would require rounding up a control group of participants with very little exposure to bisphenol A — no small feat. Calafat's recent findings showed that, among roughly 2,500 Americans tested in 2003 and 2004, more than 95% already had traces of bisphenol A in their urine. Alternatively, researchers could test how higher-than-average doses of bisphenol A affects people. Again, a likely dead end. "As a scientist it would be pretty much unethical to do that study knowing what [bisphenol A] does in animal studies," says Laura Vandenberg, a post-doc fellow at Harvard Medical School who researches bisphenol A, and is a critic of its use.
The obvious solution may seem to be, when in doubt, ban it. If there's a chance that bisphenol A hurts kids, then why run the risk? Certainly, parents have little interest in waiting for scientific evidence when they think their children's health is in danger. Hence, the many state legislators who want to limit bisphenol A's use now. But without evidence, anything could be considered potentially harmful. Right now, U.S. and E.U. health and environment authorities still believe the best evidence supports continued use of regular polycarbonate baby bottles.
Polycarbonate plastic is used for a reason: It's useful. Hard, shatterproof, lightweight and clear, it's in a huge range of products from water bottles and food storage containers, to lenses in eyeglasses and car headlights, CDs and DVDs, and even bulletproof glass. "Whether you realize it or not, you use it in your life every day," says Steven Hentges, head of the polycarbonate group at the industry lobby organization American Chemistry Council. There are, of course, alternatives to polycarbonates, like glass and other plastics. And for the growing number of consumers opposed to bisphenol A, there's no shortage of online resources to help find them.
Many food additives have been studied and linked to various diseases. Becoming informed about the additives in everyday food items can make for an easier shopping experience and healthier food for everyone.
Here’s a list of some of the most medically questionable and harmful additives in everyday foods:
Since some of these may not be familiar to you, sodium nitrite is a preservative added most commonly to bacon, ham, hot dogs, sandwich meats, and smoked fish. BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole) and BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) are other preservatives added to foods like cereal, gum, potato chips, and vegetable oils. Propyl gallate is found in meats, chicken soup base, and gum. All of these preservatives have been linked to cancer.
Monosodium glutamate (MSG) can cause migraines and other adverse effects. Trans fats are being eliminated from most foods, as the studies linking them to heart disease, strokes, and kidney problems are widely accepted.
Aspartame is an artificial sweetener found in products like NutraSweet and Equal as well as diet foods and soft drinks. And acesulfame-K is a newer sweetener used in soft drinks and some baked goods.
Many food colorings have been banned by the FDA, but some can still be found in foods that require a particular color. Olestra was common for a time in potato chips as an additive that prevented fat from being absorbed in your digestive system. Food colorings have been tied to cancer and Olestra also blocks vitamins from being processed.
Potassium bromate is sometimes added to white flour, breads, and rolls to increase the volume of the products, but it has cancer-causing properties that have prompted some states in America to actually require a label to that effect.
Finally, white sugar and sodium chloride (salt) can be dangerous if not kept to a minimum.
Recent scientific research has shown that incorporating soy into your diet may help reduce your risk of cancer. Scientists have noted particularly low rates of breast cancer in countries such as China and Japan where soy foods are prevalent in everyday diets.
Scientists are performing continued research to explore the promising cancer benefits of adding soy to your diet.
However given all the other added benefits of adding soy to your diet there is no reason not to start including soy into your diet. Melilea Organic Soy Drink is one easy and convenient way to do just that!
Strategies for Reducing Cancer Risk
Diet has been studied closely in relation to prostate, breast and colon cancers. Top health organizations have suggested that you can reduce your risk for cancer by implementing the following dietary and lifestyle strategies.
Remember no single food or diet can guarantee that you will be protected against cancer. However following a diet that includes fruits, vegetables and other foods (in particular organic or natural sources) that are rich in whole plant foods is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle.
Caveman food was never cooked as fire was not yet tamed. Thus, he ate only those foods that you can eat without treatment with or by fire. He ate fruits, vegetables, fish (sushi anyone?), eggs, nuts and meat. Yes, even meat. You can even eat meat raw if you were starving in the forest. You have the necessary enzymes to digest meat.
However, rice, like wheat and corn, cannot be eaten raw. It must be cooked. Even if you were starving in the desert, you cannot eat rice in the raw form. This is because we do not have the system of enzymes to break rice down. You were never meant to eat rice. To make matters worse, you not only eat rice, but also make it the bulk of your food.
In some parts of Asia , rice forms up to 85% of the plate. Even if you take rice, keep it to a minimum. Remember, it is only for your tongue – not your body. Actually, rice and other grains like wheat and corn are actually worse than sugar. There are many reasons:
Rice becomes sugar – lots of it!
This is a fact that no nutritionist can deny: rice is chemically no different from sugar. One bowl of cooked rice is the caloric equal of 10 teaspoons of sugar. This does not matter whether it is white, brown or herbal rice. Brown rice is richer in fibre, some B vitamins and minerals but it is still the caloric equal of 10 teaspoons of sugar. To get the same 10 teaspoons of sugar, you need to consume lots of kangkong-10 bowls of it.
Rice is digested to become sugar.
Rice cannot be digested before it is thoroughly cooked. However, when thoroughly cooked, it becomes sugar and spikes circulating blood sugar within half an hour-almost as quickly as it would if you took a sugar candy. Rice is very low in the ‘rainbow of anti-oxidants. ‘
This complete anti-oxidant rainbow is necessary for the effective and safe utilisation of sugar. Fruits come with a sugar called fructose. However, they are not empty calories as the fruit is packed with a whole host of other nutrients that help its proper assimilation and digestion.
Rice has no fibre. The fibre of the kangkong fills you up long before your blood sugar spikes. This is because the fibre bulks and fills up your stomach. Since white rice has no fibre, you end up eating lots of ‘calorie dense’ food before you get filled up.
Rice is tasteless-sugar is sweet. There is only so much that you can eat at one sitting. How many teaspoons of sugar can you eat before you feel like throwing up? Could you imagine eating 10 teaspoons of sugar in one seating?
Rice is always the main part of the meal. While sugar may fill your dessert or sweeten your coffee, it will never be the main part of any meal. You could eat maybe two to three teaspoons of sugar at one meal. However, you could easily eat the equal value of two to three bowls (20-30 teaspoons) of sugar in one meal. I am always amused when I see someone eat sometimes five bowls of rice (equals 50 teaspoons of sugar) and then asks for tea tarik kurang manis!
There is no real ‘built in’ mechanism for us to prevent overeating of rice:
How much kangkong can you eat?
How much fried chicken can you eat?
How much steamed fish can you eat?
Think about that!
In one seating, you cannot take lots of chicken, fish or cucumber, but you can take lots of rice. Eating rice causes you to eat more salt.
As rice is tasteless, you tend to consume more salt-another villain when it comes to high blood pressure. You tend to take more curry that has salt to help flavor rice. We also tend to consume more ketchup and soy sauce which are also rich in salt.
Eating rice causes you to drink less water. The more rice you eat, the less water you will drink as there is no mechanism to prevent the overeating of rice. Rice, wheat and corn come hidden in our daily food. As rice is tasteless, it tends to end up in other foods that substitute rice like rice flour, noodles and bread. We tend to eat the hidden forms which still get digested into sugar. Rice, even when cooked, is difficult to digest.
Can’t eat raw rice? Try eating rice half cooked. Contrary to popular belief, rice is very difficult to digest. It is ‘heavy stuff’. If you have problems with digestion, try skipping rice for a few days. You will be amazed at how the problem will just go away.
Rice prevents the absorption of several vitamins and minerals. Rice when taken in bulk will reduce the absorption of vital nutrients like zinc, iron and the B vitamins..
Are you a rice addict? Going rice-less may not be easy but you can go rice-less. Eating less rice could be lot easier than you think. Here are some strategies that you can pursue in your quest to eat less rice:
Eat less rice-cut your rice by half. Barry Sears, author of the Zone Diet, advises ‘eating rice like spice’.
Instead, increase your fruits and vegetables.
Take more lean meats and fish.
You can even take more eggs and nuts.
Have ‘riceless’ meals. Take no rice or wheat at say, breakfast. Go for eggs instead.
Go on ‘riceless’ days-Go ‘western’ once a week.
Take no rice and breads for one day every week. That can’t be too difficult. Appreciate the richness of your food. Go for taste, colours and smells. Make eating a culinary delight. Enjoy your food in the original flavours.
Avoid the salt shaker or ketchup. You will automatically eat less rice.
Eat your fruit dessert before (Yes! No printing error) your meals.
The fibre rich fruits will ‘bulk up’ in your stomach. Thus, you will eat less rice and more fruits.
It’s your life. Decide what you want to eat! Brown rice has more fibre but still the same amount of sugar.
