As I mentioned a while back, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, authors of Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health. Now, I must admit, when I first saw this book, my initial reaction was to roll my eyes and think, “Ugh, do I really need to be more paranoid about everything I eat, drink, use and so on? Isn’t fretting about global warming giving me enough stress?” So I put the book down and walked away. But then, it began following me. For reals. While on a stop in Calgary to promote Sleeping Naked is Green, my publicist kept making all these phone calls for the next day’s marathon of interviews — her clients happened to be Rick and Bruce, who were coming into town right after me. Then, a friend of mine got in touch the next week wanting to meet for lunch, and low and behold, it turned out that her mom used to be Rick’s employer at IFAW. When we sat down to eat, she brought out a copy of his book and handed it to me. No avoiding it now.

Well, I’m pleased to say, I thoroughly enjoyed Slow Death — yes, there’s a lot of disturbing information to digest, but the authors write about it in a very smart yet accessible, self-deprecating kind of way, and offer a host of ideas for how to be proactive about eliminating chemicals from your day-to-day life. So, without further ado (or rambling… what the heck does “ado” mean, anyway?), here’s the interview:

Thistle: What surprised me a bit about your experiment was the fact that, prior to exposing yourself to all this mercury, phthalates and BPA, you couldn’t get your levels of anything down to zero.

Bruce: Yeah, the notion of getting to zero is impossible, even if you’re hyper-vigilant about it, because all this stuff is not only in the products we use but in the environment, the water, the air.

Rick: And Bruce and I pretty much obsessed in a way nobody ever would over how to insulate ourselves from these chemicals, but in no case were we able to completely rid ourselves of a toxin. Even with something like triclosan, which is relatively well-labelled in Canada — theoretically, you should be able to stay clear of it, but the problem is that so many consumer products are being made with it and it’s ending up in landfills, leaching out of them into lakes and rivers, and into our drinking water.

Bruce: You can actually test polar bears in the Arctic for most of these things and they’ll test positive, despite the fact that they don’t use deodorant or microwave their food… although the modern ones do.

Thistle: [Laughs] Of course. But just knowing that you couldn’t rid yourself of these chemicals no matter what you did must have made you slightly neurotic or depressed, no?

Bruce: Yes, for sure. There’s a whole body of evidence now showing that the theory of chemicals only affecting our health at higher levels isn’t true, and that, actually, nothing more than 0 is safe. Any level can affect the body and our brains during development, especially if it’s early fetal or childhood exposure. It’s tough to document direct evidence of these things, but you can see in the general weight of evidence that it’s pointing to modern childhood epidemics such as obesity and diabetes.

Thistle: How many people realize this? Is there anything we can do?

Rick: That was one of the main reasons why we wanted to write this book. At Environmental Defence, we’ve been working in this area of policy for a while. We tested 50 Canadians for levels of toxins in their blood — politicians, urban and rural Canadians, children and so on — and the recurring questions that people had over and over again was ‘How does this stuff get in me?’ and ‘What can I do to get it out?’ We couldn’t say with certainty that if you avoid a certain brand of shampoo you can dramatically reduce a certain hormone-disrupting chemical, so we needed to establish cause and effect properly. We concluded that if you focus on a few really important chemicals, you can dramatically reduce their levels in your system almost overnight.

Thistle: That’s kind of reassuring. But do you ever feel helpless?

Rick: It can be immensely frustrating, especially as parents, when you’re trying to do right by your kid, trying to choose the right brand of baby wipes or whatever. Sometimes you feel like you’re losing your mind; you’re trying to do the right thing but labelling requirements are often inadequate and chemicals have a million letters and syllables so they’re hard to decipher.

Thistle: How does one start tackling this problem?

Bruce: People generally seem to think the marketplace will solve these issues, but when it comes to regulating toxic chemicals, protecting people from obscure toxic ingredients, it doesn’t work at all. So the public has to be aware and involved, but at the same time governments need to be better regulated.

Rick: The web has also made a huge difference recently — there are cosmetics databases, healthy toys databases, blog groups dedicated to answering these questions. This is all happening now and it didn’t exist two years ago. On the government side, they’re also really at a tipping point — there’s a tremendous amount of progress happening right now, exciting progress.

Thistle: How did you decide which chemicals to focus on in your book?

Bruce: There are something like 10,000 chemicals in commerce and 95% have not been tested on human health and we know nothing about them. We tried to choose things that were representative of daily products in your life. But there are dozens and dozens.

Rick: There was also some method to our madness in choosing these few. They’re some of the most broadly distributed toxic chemicals that people come into contact with on a daily basis, they have the strongest evidence of harming children, but most importantly, they have the most exciting progress in terms of government action. With swine flu, there’s been an explosion of anti-bacterial products in last few months. The ones that are alcohol-based are fine (like Purell), but there are other ones that have triclosan (most often found in antibacterial soaps), which is linked to thyroid problems. And as a population, just in last few months, you have to think that the country’s exposure to this has gone through the roof.

Thistle: Do you think maybe people aren’t considering the toxicity of these chemicals and preservatives because there isn’t an immediate, physical cause-and-effect between using antibacterial toothpaste twice a day and becoming more susceptible to disease?

Bruce: Well, it’s always a much more curious or publicly appealing thing to be preventing people from getting very sick immediately, but in the case of something like swine flu, maybe six people have died of that in Canada. Conversely, how many thousands have developed some kind of neurological impairment or cancer because of pervasive toxic chemicals, including the hand sanitizers in office lobbies?

Thistle: So if you were able to just convey one or two important changes that people should be making right now to avoid these chemicals, what would they be?

Bruce: Don’t buy non-stick frying pans — that’s an easy one. Don’t eat food out of a plastic container, especially if you’ve just put it in the microwave. Try to avoid stain-repellant stuff.

Rick: Coating on furniture. That used to be impossible to figure out how to avoid, but there are huge companies, like IKEA, that advertise the fact that their upholstered products are made without flame retardants or other chemicals. On older furniture, you can check for a manufacturing label. A lot of stuff is Google-able, so you can go online and look up different chemicals.

To watch a brief video of Rick and Bruce’s experiment in toxicity, click here!

Also known as “sea cows”, manatees are quite possibly one of my favourite animals. My mom and sister love them, too, and we often adopt them for one another at Christmas through the Save the Manatee Club (co-founded by Jimmy Buffett, apparently). Now, according to this National Geographic video, they might be in less danger of getting plowed over by boats thanks to a new high-pitched beeping device (it would require people paying about $100 to attach the device to their boats, but hey, it’s a start). Give it a watch and try not to coo at the sight of a scuba diver getting his noggin sucked on by an adorable manatee!

My garden is lovely. It really is; and it’s mostly thanks to my mother, who sneaks in while I’m away to plant hostas, Virginia creepers, herbs, ferns and juniper bushes. I’ve added my own lavender and cat grass to the mix, and on my top deck there’s the tomato plant, overly ambitious blueberry bush, spring onions, lettuce and Mr. Meyer Lemon. Out front, I’ve got an enormous, surely hundred-year-old tree (I don’t even know what it is, actually, but I want to say it’s an oak) with some unruly green bushy business underneath (what is that again, Mom?).

But the amount of actual gardening space is still fairly restricted; I do live right downtown, after all, in a highly dense row of houses. While lamenting this fact the other night in a conversation with Lloyd and Kelly Alter — both fellow Torontonians and writers at Treehugger.com — they began also lamenting the state of their own garden. Every summer, they go up to the cottage for two months, and whatever they plant in their backyard usually dies by the time they return.

“Well, why don’t I look after it?” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Kelly’s eyes lit up as she realized the potential of this: They could spend the next few days filling their yard with fruit and vegetable seedlings, give me a quick briefing on which plants need what kind of care, show me where all the tools are and how to get in, then relax up at their cottage knowing I’d be dropping by the Toronto homestead on a regular basis to water, weed and maybe aerate the soil.

By September, there’d be a solid harvest.

What’s in it for me? Well, the Alters have done all the purchasing and planting ahead of time and have also offered to split the bounty (providing I don’t kill everything!), and in the mean time, I get some extra gardening practice. It’s kind of like a community garden or an allotment, but more straightforward — in a word, I’m garden-sitting.

So from time to time, over the next couple months, I’ll be blogging about my experiences in surrogate urban gardening, posting lots of photos so Lloyd and Kelly can check in on my progress from the cottage and see how things are going. To begin, here’s a pic of me weeding around the kale plants earlier this afternoon, snapped by Jacob, who claimed he was too jet-lagged and full of ribs to help:

Er, yeah. Ignore the cleavage please. Anyway, I was mostly weeding, but also clipping back some dead parts of the rose bushes, aerating the soil a bit and making sure everything was watered. Some things are looking pretty good: The lettuce is still alive, the squash and zucchini plants are growing, the basil is healthy. But the Alters seem to have a lot more animal issues than me: The kale was being eaten by some sort of bug, a lot of the bell pepper and bean seedlings are now only tiny stalks, and the tomato plant… well, see for yourself:

I don’t know what got into that. Either way, we’ll see how things go — maybe I’ll bring around some of my organic slug bait and fertilizer next time, or rearrange their chicken wire to make it more animal-proof. I’m also going to wear sturdier gloves — those rose thorns are killer!

That’s it for now! Happy gardening, everyone!

A lot of the girls I know always say they don’t wear much makeup other than lipgloss and mascara, or concealer and mascara, or a tiny bit of blush and mascara — but for whatever reason, the mascara is a must. I’m not sure if this is a North American thing, or if the need for dark, long and voluminous lashes has been ingrained in my generation, but this product has definitely become a staple of the average woman’s makeup kit. Personally, I’ve never been a huge fan; coating these teensie, fragile hairs that are supposed to protect my ability to see with dark guck that will probably smudge or work its way into my eyes somehow just doesn’t seem right. If it’s a special occasion, sure, I’ll use it, but I tend to rely on the classic pink and green tube of Maybelline Great Lash mascara that I’ve had since high school, which has pretty much dried up completely. This does the trick, but it gets a mediocre score of 5 on EWG’s Cosmetics Database, which makes my nose crinkle a bit.

However, the fine folks at one of my new favourite online green stores, Green Cricket, just sent me a few beauty products to try out, and while I normally don’t like to write posts that sound like advertorials, I just need to say that I am fully sold on this sugar-based Suncoat Natural mascara. It gets a much more respectable score of 2 from EWG and there’s a lot of suction power when you pull the brush out, which means less of the stuff gets used each time, and if any of it does end up in my eyes, it’s not really toxic enough to do any harm.

It’s still not something I’d use every day, but it makes me happy that I can finally say: My makeup kit is 100% complete with as-natural-as-it-gets cosmetics. If you want to get this stuff, you can find it online here or most likely at your nearest health food store.

In the mean time, speaking of avoiding toxins in our everyday products, check in at Green as a Thistle soon for my interview with Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie of Environmental Defence — they just released a fantastic book called Slow Death By Rubber Duck and I asked them all about the evils of non-stick frying pans, flame-retardant pyjamas and estrogen-mimicking hormones in our baby bottles. Stay tuned!

Image yoinked from this here blog.

Do you ever come back from a huge grocery run, restock your fridge and cupboards, then try to make a great homemade meal and find that nothing you bought actually goes together? This is an ongoing problem of mine, which explains why my dinners are technically healthy but usually consist of bizarre combinations (asparagus and avocado on red lentils, hummus with raw veggies and a side of pasta, etc.). And breakfast — well, that’s even worse. My breakfast every single day is usually granola and yogurt with some kind of fruit because I can’t be bothered to cook eggs, but I feel like toast on its own is insufficient, and I don’t know how to make a proper oatmeal.

Anyway, this culminated in a visit from Meghan, in which she scavenged the depths of my pantry and made use of some fruit I’d just acquired from this guy named Ezra who runs a company called Fruit4Thought, which delivers apples, plums, nectarines and bananas to busy Bay Street lawyers and collections agencies up in the suburbs where there are no decent restaurants within walking distance, so employees have a healthy alternative to food courts and vending machines (I was interviewing him for the Post, so he gave me a box full of about 25 different fruits).

Meg managed to make a fruit crumble, which was delicious — although I sneakily added some butter and maple syrup after she left — and it’s a recipe I think I could replicate and even tinker with pretty easily. You can see her post for the details; in the mean time, here’s the video:

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear… I totally spoke too soon. For some reason, I figured offering free copies of my book to other bloggers would result in three, maybe four emails. And, um… I got about 50. On the one hand, THAT IS SO AWESOME! Knowing there’s that much interest in my book makes me incredibly happy. But on the other hand, it KILLS ME that I can’t give a book to every single one of you. Maybe one day I will record some sort of visual-audio-book of me wearing a cardigan and fake glasses and reading from Sleeping Naked is Green in soft-spoken tones and I’ll upload it to YouTube so that you can all listen to it for free.

Sadly, until then, I will have to forcefully shove my grimy foot into my mouth (see above photo), hop onto my bicycle and back-pedal, back-pedal, back-pedal (which will probably be a rather awkward process, what with one foot being in my mouth and all).

Anyway, PLEASE forgive me! For all who have emailed, expect a reply soon — I will choose five bloggers to receive a copy of the book; the others will hopefully receive some other kind of green freebie (I get sent a lot of those from eco-friendly companies), but as of now, the offer is closed. However, keep in mind there will be contests and giveaways throughout the summer here at Green as a Thistle, so stay tuned. And finally, for those in the New York area, I’ll be speaking in Bryant Park and having a mini-launch in Brooklyn on July 15th, so if you’d like to come to either event, email me about that and I’ll give you the deets.

P.S. I took this photo late at night, when I was still in my schleppy working-from-home attire. Hey, at least it’s organic cotton!

P.P.S. To all the foot fetishists — get outta here! That’s gross.

For all those green bloggers out there (or even health bloggers, mommy bloggers, Toronto bloggers, etc.), I’ve got some excellent news: You can now get a FREE copy of Sleeping Naked is Green. All I ask is that you write to me at greenasathistle@gmail.com and let me know what your blog is all about and how many visitors you tend to get; then, all my publishers ask is that you write up a review on your site when you’ve finished. It doesn’t have to be long and smart-sounding — heck, it doesn’t even have to be positive — it just needs to tell everyone that you’ve read my book and, subsequently, that you have an opinion on it.

Not sure you have time to read?
It’s summer! Of course you do! Besides, my book is short and quick and funny; you’ll be done in no time.

Think it’s just going to be a rehashing of my blog?
Wrong again! It’s 100% original content, with everything from an apartment nearly burning down to worms crawling all over my living room; there’s even a love story that would make Jane Austen weep!

Want more proof?
Read some of the candid reviews on Amazon.com — except for one dude, who doesn’t seem to approve of books in general, and some other girl who thought I was “trying too hard” (note to self: try less in future) — they all reinforce the fact that this isn’t another “How to be green” tome with boring tips; it’s an account of all the mental, emotional and spiritual ups and downs I went through in trying to lighten my footprint in 366 ways; how this affected my work, my relationships, and even my cat; and what I ultimately learned about the importance of hypocrisy and blurry lines in today’s environmental movement. And did I mention it’s funny?

So write to me today!

Aaaaand, even if you don’t have your own blog, fret not — I’ll be holding contests all summer to give away signed copies of Sleeping Naked (because you know my signature is worth at least $10,000).

Stay tuned!

As many of you know, my lovely boyfriend bought me a Meyer lemon tree for Christmas last year. I just thought I’d update you on how he’s doing (the tree, not the boyfriend), now that it’s sunny and lovely outside.

In a word: Not much has changed. We moved him into a bigger pot, threw some organic fertilizer on top of the soil and are now putting him outside whenever it’s sunny and warm (he doesn’t like much water or temperatures below 10 degrees Celsius). He’s got about five flowers blossoming, as well as three or four lemons, one of which is pretty big:

But he’s not growing much. I think this is maybe because all of his energy is being directed into the lemons rather than creating new branches and leaves. Am I right? And is this a good thing or bad thing? Should I be pruning or picking off the buds?

Also, there’s a bit of a mould problem — his soil is looking mighty furry:

Is this due to over-watering? A bug infestation? What am I doing wrong?!

Sigh… gardening can be stressful. I can’t imagine actually having children to look after! Anyway, my other plants seem to be thriving, which is a good sign. I’ve got a shallow ceramic bowl of lettuce, which I’ve learned LOVES lots of water (it was totally wilted and dying until a big thunderstorm revived it overnight):

Then there’s my organic tomato plant, given to me by my editor and his wife as a congrats present for Sleeping Naked is Green:

Some spring onions, which Jacob wanted:

And finally, a wee blueberry bush (if you can call it that, which I don’t think you really can at this point). It might not produce anything edible until about three decades from now, but at least it’s still alive! Oh, and that’s a little Cosmos flower sprouting beside it.

That’s about it for my rooftop gardening experiment… in my actual garden down below I have some lavender, chives and a bucket full of herbs that my mom gave me. What do you have growing? Any disasters? Any lessons learned?

How on this sweet earth will I EVER thank Glark for calling my attention to this amazingly starchy music video?

She really gives it in the second refrain.

More to come.

OK, so this doesn’t exactly conform to the format of FTPTTB in that I’m not about to reveal a moisturizer recipe that calls for olive oil and honey (although I’m sure you could use those ingredients for moistening purposes). Instead, my skin care tip of the day is: Nothing!

Remember, a few months ago, when I was complaining of that weird rash I had under my eyes after I stupidly used my diluted-vinegar-and-cinnamon concoction — originally intended as a hair conditioner — in place of toner? Yeah, a word for the novices out there trying to tackle homemade beauty products: cinnamon and delicate regions of the epidermis do NOT go together. Anyway, I was trying a bunch of different remedies to bring my under-eye area back to normal, including almond oil (nope), safflower oil (nope), vitamin A and E (nope), jojoba oil (nope) and my ever-beloved coconut oil (nope), and while most of these would kind of work temporarily, all it took was one shower or face wash (with or without any soap) for my skin to freak out again.

Now, my approach when it comes to health or skin problems is to try a natural remedy first; if that doesn’t work, I come crawling to my mother for some good ol’ Western medicine. Of course, I could have tried reconfiguring my diet — eliminating coffee, alcohol, yeast; introducing more antioxidants, lycopene and whatnot — but to be honest, I’d rather have rashy eyes and a glass of shiraz in my hands than a flawless complexion and nothing but water after an eight-hour day of work.

So my mom gave me some Cortate cream she had lying around the bathroom. Actually, it was lying around my sister’s bathroom, because she apparently applies this stuff liberally for no medicinal reason other than it gives off a nice “glow” (if you’ve read my book, you’ll know this is par for the course in terms of her logic … and, actually, it does leave a healthy-looking sheen, regardless of how fake it may be).

Now, although cortisone can be kind of sketchy in high doses, this stuff was only 0.5%, so I figured a few short-term applications of it wouldn’t kill me. And the result: It worked! Well, sort of.

It worked temporarily — I applied it at night and the next morning my skin looked great; even washing and towel-drying my face didn’t seem to hamper its efficacy. But the problem was, as soon as I tried to wean myself off the cortisone, the rash came back within days. Now, technically, I could keep using this cream on a daily basis for the rest of my life, but my gut kept saying, “Your eyes were fine six months ago and they didn’t require any drugs!” This was driving me crazy.

The funny thing was, every time I complained about this rash and went about applying yet another new oil or ointment, Jacob would say, “Why don’t you just leave it alone? If you didn’t put anything under your eyes before, why are you doing all of this now?”

He had a point, but I was sure that if I went to bed at night with rashy under-eyes and didn’t do anything about it, I’d wake up the next morning looking as though I’d contracted some horrible disease.

But the other day, out of exasperation, I decided to give it a shot. I had no plans to go out the following morning and, even if that changed, I had some concealer that would at least hide the redness.

Well, guess what? The boy was right. My eyes felt a little dry, but otherwise looked fine other than a few spots. Another few days of this, and they’re practically back to normal. See for yourself:

(This is right after I woke up, so I don’t have any makeup on and look kinda tired, but still — no rash!)

Moral of the story: Our bodies don’t NEED lotions, potions, creams and exfoliants. Sure, applying some type of oil every now and then (especially in the winter) helps against dryness, as does drinking plenty of water; and of course, if you have psoriasis or eczema, that will probably require some treatment, whether drug-based, food-based or both. But on the whole, it’s always better to opt for a minimalist hygiene routine — this benefits both yourself and the environment.