Is your plastic water bottle killing you?
Well, it depends on who you ask. Nalgene, probably the best known maker of the hard, plastic water bottles that adults use, says “Of course not!” but they are still phasing out their polycarbonate lines. (Polycarbonate is that rigid, clear plastic that almost all of their bottles were made of.) Nalgene, along with many other bottle companies, are phasing out polycarbonates due to consumer pressure around Bisphenol A (BPA).
How to Find Healthy & Safe Seafood & Fish: Without Antibiotics, Mercury, GM Feed, or Cloned Genetics
Demystifying Eating Fish: How to find baby and mama (and earth)-safe seafood When I lived in the Midwest, I didn’t think much about fish and seafood. The fish that came out of Lake Erie weren’t particularly appetizing. Now, that I live on the coast, fish and seafood are a regular (and tasty) part of my…
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How & Why to Get a Truly Natural Mattress: When organic isn’t enough
A truly healthy, green mattress might be the most important investment you make in your home. Certainly, it is in your child’s bedroom. Why get a truly natural mattress? Because conventional mattresses are toxic and the toxins they release (and continue to release throughout their entire life) have been found in the blood of newborn…
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The health risks of soy infant formula
Soy versus milk formula? Breastmilk is the healthy and green choice. However, if a baby does need formula, what next? The issue isn’t being talked about enough in the right circles because mom’s still have lots of questions, despite the fact that the research in this case gives us a clear answer to questions like…
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How to Detoxify your Personal Lubricant, Find Healthier Options, and Make Your Own Organic Lube
It’s gross: we add some of the most researched toxins to our personal lubricants including known irritants, cancer-causers, and even an ingredient in anti-freeze. None of these ingredients help the health of a woman and some can significantly harm fertility or make a woman more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). In particular watch…
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Your home is polluted. Why is indoor air quality so bad?
Why Is Our Indoor Air So Polluted? In most of our homes, the answer to this question is, “because we have made it that way.” The pollution most often comes from things we bring into the house that release their chemical ingredients into the air of our home. Furniture, stinky cleaning supplies, paints, or any…
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Miami Blues
If you are Cuban, you have family in Miami. If you live in a cold clime, like Chicago, you welcome going to visit them during the relentless winter. That sounds simple enough, no? It is. Until you have children. And you’ve gone Green. (Or, “loca”, if your abuela was to describe it.) Packing was easy…
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Violetas: A toxic cultural tradition
Violets are Blue 1 (CI42090) If you are Cuban, and old enough to read this, you have smelled like “Violetas.” You were doused in it from the moment that you came from the hospital, wearing red booties to ward off the “evil eye.” The only time you weren’t smelling of violets, is when you were…
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The Green Mama & Baby Kits: Giving love in a basket
The Green Mama helps bring the best in natural, safe, effective products for mama and baby Sometimes, I am pretty earnest I believe in truth: in helping people find their individual path through the confusing world of parenting. To do that, I try to bring my talent for health research, my search for ecological answers,…
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The Review Process
Why I Do Reviews? I got into reviews by accident. After working for about 20 years in the green world as an eco-designer, writer, researcher, and consultant, I had a lot of information to share. I found when I was giving talks or writing, that people loved to learn “the truth” about things. I commonly…
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Cleanse 101: Juicing, fasting & detoxing your insides
I worked with Dr. Sanja Tamburic, a naturopathic physician, to develop a 21-day cleanse for myself and I thought it would apply or inspire many others. Who should cleanse? This is a relatively gentle cleanse and I like that it isn’t a fad-style cleanse (with a fancy name and a requirement to do something weird…
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Bone Broth Recipe
Bone broth is nutrient rich and great for the whole family, including babies. It’s the only thing other than breast milk and water, that I ever put into bottles for my babies. Ingredients: • Approximately 4 pounds of organic (ideally free-range) marrow bones, knuckle bones, bits of leftover beef (or lamb or venison or buffalo…
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Soy versus milk infant formula
Dear Vanessa, I really feel for your struggle. There are so many stresses with having a new baby and feeding the baby is usually number one on all moms lists: whether they breastfeed or formula-feed. There are some additional stresses when formula feeding a baby, because the chances of the baby being intolerant are much…
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Make your own dairy-free milk formulas for infants, toddlers, children
Are you looking for a dairy-free or milk-protein-free milk substitute or infant formula? First, please remember that it is extremely rare that a baby would be lactose sensitive or allergic. Breast milk is made up largely of lactose and baby’s are designed to consume breastmilk. There is a genetic condition that does occur that makes…
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Tips for natural living and parenting in the modern world
Dear Sofi, thanks for your question. I feel ya! Even after 15 years as an ecological designer and green consultant, I still felt like it actually needed to be a full time job to figure out how to be a more natural mom. So much so that I wrote the book and have dedicated my…
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Making Images for the Green Mama Book
Manda, better known now as The Green Mama, and I met twenty years ago on the first day of cross-country preseason when I was a freshman and she was a sophomore at Oberlin College. There was an instant energetic connection that has persisted from the very first moment. Was it because we were both devout vegans at…
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