HELP KEEP LANDLINE PHONES: COMMENTS NEEDED BY APRIL 18TH

When North Coast Holistics rented office space in the Jutila Center, our door included a sign asking, "Please turn off cell phones before entering." We hoped this precaution would help raise awareness about the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile phones. We also encouraged people to use corded landlines to avoid the electromagnetic fields associated with cell phones and digital cordless phones.

Now, the future existence of landlines is at risk. In a recent rulemaking, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing to take the first steps toward phasing out traditional circuit-switched landlines.

The FCC proposes to shift monies from the Universal Service Fund to broadband, which could make landline phone service uneconomical.

This is problematic for several reasons, as analog landlines continue to have several benefits over cell phones and digital communications:

• Landlines continue to be important in emergencies; when the power grid goes down, cell phone service can be disrupted while traditional circuit-switched landlines continue to operate. Cell phone companies rely on landline circuits during such times to complete and route calls.

• Landlines do not have the lack-of-privacy problems associated with cell phones.

• Landlines do not interfere with medical implants; some people have experienced interference with implant operation due to wireless signals from cell phones and other wireless devices.

• Landlines do not have the same health risks which a growing body of evidence attributes to use of cell phones, such as increased risk of salivary gland tumors, acoustic neuromas, decreased sperm quality, and possibly some cancers.

• Landlines are currently the only telecommunications option for many electrically sensitive individuals who cannot use cell phones or other wireless devices without getting sick. An estimated 10 million U.S. residents have such sensitivities and would be left without options if landlines were eliminated.

In our household, we are especially concerned about the health issues. We don’t use cell phones, and my electrically sensitive spouse cannot use wireless devices of any kind without suffering symptoms.

If landlines are phased out, households like ours will no longer have healthy choices for telecommunications. And given the growing body of scientific literature demonstrating that wireless devices do affect living cells, often detrimentally, eliminating landlines seems risky for public health in general.

If you would like to keep landlines as a telecommunications option, PLEASE COMMENT BY APRIL 18TH.

You can do this online by going to
http://www.regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=FCC-2011-0078-0001

This gets you to a form with spaces to fill in your name and contact info, as well as comments of up to 2,000 characters (including spaces). You can also attach additional documents with your comments.

Here is a suggestion of what you can say in the comments field:

Please continue to maintain the analog circuit-switched telephone network, our system of traditional landlines. This system continues to play an important role in U.S. communications, including during times of emergency. In addition, it is the only telecommunications system that many electrically sensitive people are physically able to use. Estimates suggest there could be 10 million Americans affected by such electrical sensitivities. Traditional landlines must be maintained to continue providing truly universal phone service.

If you wish to write longer comments, here are some additional opinion pieces that offer ideas:

http://planetthrive.com/2011/04/a-call-for-solidarity/
Blog post by Steen Hviid, who is chemically and electrically sensitive

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/119508214.html
Scroll down to find the letter to the editor by Charyl Zehfus of Sheboygan, Wisconsin

http://libertyslogic.blogspot.com/2011/04/tell-fcc-to-maintain-landlines.html
A conservative blogger’s rundown of reasons to maintain landlines - several good links to further information in this one

For those who wish to delve more deeply, the FCC’s complete 289-page rulemaking proposal is available as a pdf file at http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2011/db0209/FCC-11-13A1.pdf .

You can also find a link to excellent commenting instructions on the action alert page of the EMR Policy Institute, at http://www.emrpolicy.org/news/action/index.htm.

Thank you to all who comment on this important issue!

Sources of information used for this post include the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, the Cellular Phone Task Force, the Center for Safer Wireless, and the links listed above.

Favorite Free and Low-Cost Health Tips

As the year ends and we take stock of things like health and finances, it’s a good time to consider ways to support our health without spending a lot of money. With that in mind, here’s a rundown of ten of my favorite low-cost holistic health tips.

1. Take walks. Study after study shows that people who walk more live longer and reap all sorts of other health benefits, too. Walking not only helps control weight, it helps control chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease. The cost of walking? Only a little wear and tear on your shoes. Walk instead of driving on short trips and you’ll save money on gas, too.

2. Meditate for a minute or more a day. It costs nothing but a little time to sit and focus on the breath, but the rewards are great. Studies have found improvements in blood pressure, memory, cognitive function, and more from regular meditation. Even one minute a day is enough to bring some improvement.

3. Tap your meridians. Meridian tapping – the general term applied to therapeutic systems of tapping various points on the body’s acupuncture meridians – is a versatile method that requires no special equipment and only a little knowledge. The most well-known tapping system is EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique; you can get free information about it at various websites. Used first to treat phobias and emotional issues, meridian tapping can also support physical health.

4. Write in a journal. How you do this writing can make a difference to your health. Research by James Pennebaker and others has shown that expressive writing – recording both the events of a trauma and the feelings it evoked – can help improve immune function, blood pressure, and other physiological measures of health. Another health-boosting way to write: keep a gratitude journal by writing down 3 to 5 things a day for which you feel thankful.

5. Do some basic detox. Start by detoxing inside your home: throw out body care and cleaning products that contain synthetic petrochemicals or fragrances. Then reduce the products you buy to just a few natural, fragrance-free items, and you’ll save money as you reduce your exposure to toxics. Here's a low-cost detox method that pampers your body: soak in a hot bath containing ½ - 1 cup of Epsom salts plus ½ - 1 cup of baking soda. The alkaline nature of this soak can help to pull out or neutralize acidity in the body.

6. Visualize good health. As the saying goes, “Your body believes everything it hears,” and that includes your mental chatter. Replacing worry with mental images of good health costs nothing, and there is much anecdotal evidence, at least, of its effectiveness. My favorite little instruction book on visualizing good health is Cell Level Healing by Joyce Whiteley Hawkes, PhD.

7. Drink water, not soda. The amount we spend on carbonated drinks each year is astronomical – how else can Coke, Pepsi, and others afford their huge ad and promo campaigns? And that doesn’t factor in the medical and dental costs that result from drinking soda. Water costs a lot less, even if you pay a metered water price and invest in a water filter (which I recommend). Plus it’s smart to keep your body hydrated for a number of reasons. Don’t buy bottled water, though, if you can avoid it.

8. Grow your own food, or at least some of it. One of the simplest ways to do this is to sprout seeds. All you need for this is a jar, some organic sprouting seeds, and water. You can also easily grow herbs or greens in a pot even if you live in an apartment, and there’s nothing better than fresh greens that you pick yourself and eat right away. If you have a yard and are lucky enough to live in a no-frost region, you can grow food outdoors year-round. We get snow, so we grow greens in a greenhouse in winter.

9. Eat it raw, or at least some of it. Eating food raw preserves nutrients and enzymes that contribute to better digestion and better overall health. Not cooking also saves energy and money, as well as time. One guideline I like is to eat at least half of your food raw at each meal.

10. Buy the rest of it fresh, local, and/or organic instead of processed, salted and/or sweetened. It’s a simple equation: the more processed a food is, the worse it generally is for you, and the more fresh and organic, the better it generally is. Fresh organic foods might look more expensive and processed foods cheap, but factor in the life-cycle and longer-term health costs of those processed foods and organic comes out looking much better. You can often get good prices on organics at farmers’ markets, too.

That’s my list. May it help you have a happy and healthy New Year!

Cell Phones, WiFi, and Health

When North Coast Holistics had an office in the Jutila Center, one of the signs on our door read, "Please turn off cell phones before entering." We hoped this precaution would help raise awareness about the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile phones and reduce exposures to that radiation, as well.

Press coverage of this issue can be confusing. The cell phone industry insists its products are safe, but enough studies suggest health problems that doctors and scientists have raised concerns. In 2008, University of Pittsburgh's Cancer Institute advised employees to limit cell phone calls to three minutes or less, and warned that children should use mobile phones only in emergencies. In 2009, the Environmental Working Group released a report about cell phones' potential danger to children and included radiation rankings to help buyers choose lower-radiation phones.

If you and your family use cell phones or WiFi, there are several sites where you can get more information about their potential effects on health. Below is a list of links which I recently compiled for a friend. I'm posting them here with the hope that they can help others with personal decision-making about cell phone / WiFi use, as well as providing more in-depth information and examples of news coverage on this issue.

1. http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-cell-phone-radiation?currentPage=1
This piece by Christopher Ketcham is one of the best I've ever seen about cell phones and wireless technologies generally. It appeared in the February 2010 issue of Gentleman's Quarterly.

2. http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-cell-phone-radiation?printable=true
This link retrieves a printable, all-one-page version of Ketcham's piece.

3. http://cell-phone-dangers.com/research/cellPhonePrecautionPittsburgh.html
This is the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute announcement referenced above, which made news as it warned about cell phone use with a list of 10 precautions to follow. In my opinion these are excellent guidelines, if one is going to use cell phones at all (the best protection is to not use them).

4. http://www.epidemiology.pitt.edu/news/News_Display.asp?link=357
This gets to a university press release about the precautionary statement above.

5. http://www.ewg.org/cellphone-radiation
This is the 2009 Environmental Working Group (EWG) report about cell phone radiation which raised concerns especially about their use by children. As mentioned above, their site also includes rankings of radiation levels from phones to help consumers choose lower radiation models (if they use cell phones). EWG also did a series of blog posts about the issue around the time they released their report:

http://www.enviroblog.org/2009/10/fall-09-cell-phone-radiation-series-1-the-science.html
http://www.enviroblog.org/2009/10/cell-phone-radiation-series-2-8-ways-to-reduce-your-exposure-to-cell-p.html
http://www.enviroblog.org/2009/11/cell-phone-radiation-series-3-whos-protecting-you.html
http://www.enviroblog.org/2009/11/cell-phone-radiation-series---part-4-what-phones-emit-bodies-absorb.html

6. http://electromagnetichealth.org
This is the home page for an advocacy group concerned with electromagnetic radiation (EMFs) and health, which seeks to establish biologically-based standards for electromagnetic radiation exposures.

7. http://www.microwavenews.com
This is probably the best overall site for unbiased-by-industry information on cell phones and wireless technologies. Written by journalist Lou Slesin, it contains a wealth of information on non-ionizing radiation from cell phones, WiFi, etc. and the health effects of same. It includes many links to further articles.

8. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/issue/5138-2009-999839997-1345066
This link gets you to the table of contents for a special issue of the journal Pathophysiology which looked at EMF research. Not everyone will want to read the full text of these scientific papers, but just scanning the titles in the table of contents tells a story.

9. http://www.healthandenvironment.org/?module=uploads&func=download&fileId=565
This list of links accesses news coverage of the 2008 Congressional hearings on cell phone safety which were convened by Dennis Kucinich.

10. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-02/disconnected
This article from Popular Science contains a tag line under the title that says "Your cell phone does not in itself cause cancer...." Note that this statement has not been proven and actually contradicts information further along in the same article. In fact, some have complained that this piece contradicts itself in several places. Still, it contains thought-provoking information about non-cancer effects of non-ionizing radiation and is worth a look.

11. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2009-09-08-cellphone-radiation-safety_N.htm
This links to a news release about the Environmental Working Group's report on cell phone radiation (see above).

12. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,389881,00.html
This is one of the articles that came out late in the summer of 2008 when cell phones were big in the news. This was partly due to the precautionary memo from University of Pittsburgh's Cancer Institute, and partly due to the Congressional hearings investigating cell phone safety.


There's plenty more out there, but I hope this can provide a start for those interested in learning more about this topic. If you have further questions or comments, I invite you to leave them in the comments section below.

Petroleum in Perfume and How to Avoid It

This companion post to my Gulf oil disaster series at Divorce Your Car! (the blog) tells a bit more about the petrochemical nature of perfume, as well as why and how to stop using it.

When we splash on scent or carefully apply cosmetics, few of us realize we are actually dowsing ourselves in petroleum products. In fact, however, cosmetics and fragrances expose us daily to huge numbers of toxic, hormone-disrupting and carcinogenic chemicals derived from crude oil.

As Randall Fitzgerald reports in his book The Hundred-Year Lie, FDA numbers show that every day, each person uses an average of nine body-care products containing 126 chemicals. In her book The Body Toxic, Nena Baker notes that the average U.S. adult uses or applies such products from twenty to twenty-five times per day. The vast majority of these products contain a slew of petrochemicals, including synthetic fragrance.

As I mentioned in the sister post to this one, 95% of the ingredients in fragrances are derived from petroleum. That statistic comes originally from the National Academy of Sciences, and via Louisa Williams’ excellent book Radical Medicine.

Petroleum-derived ingredients found in perfumes include highly toxic substances such as toluene, acetone, phthalates, derivatives of benzene, and as many as 50 to 100 other ingredients. These substances variously cause birth defects, cancer, and brain dysfunction; damage skin, eyes, liver, or kidneys; disrupt hormone function; and stimulate allergies and asthma. Certain chemicals in fragrance can be passed to children in utero and/or through breast milk, one reason a coalition of non-profits ran an ad featuring the image above to warn pregnant women away from perfume use.

Toluene is one ingredient found in all fragrance. It is flammable, nausea-inducing, and neurotoxic. As a 2005 article in The Ecologist noted, “Chronic or frequent inhalation [of toluene] can lead to irreversible brain damage.”

Phthalates lurk in virtually all fragrances as well. Used to make scents stronger and longer-lasting, these synthesized molecules can also cause cancer and mess with hormones, hastening puberty in girls and feminizing boys. Phthalates have also been correlated with abdominal obesity and insulin resistance in men.

In her fine book Not Just a Pretty Face, Stacy Malkan tells the story of some 2002 product tests that found phthalates in every single fragrance studied. The worst offender, weighing in with four different types of phthalates, was the aptly-named perfume from Christian Dior: Poison.

You can see how perfume affects the brain by viewing this SPECT (single photon emission computerized tomography) scan taken by a UCLA radiologist. The images show a patient’s brain before and after exposure to perfume; the after image indicates diminished blood flow and inflammation “consistent with exposure to neurotoxic substances.”

This is a brain on perfume. An inflamed brain not only loses function in the moment; both chronic inflammation and lower blood flow are linked to development of dementias, including Alzheimer’s disease.

If you don’t like taking such significant health risks, if you don’t want to walk around wafting or breathing petroleum byproducts, or both, you can make several simple changes. These suggestions also apply if you’re avoiding synthetic fragrances as a way to reduce petroleum use in the wake of the Gulf oil disaster, as suggested by Lynne McTaggart in her recent blog post “50 Ways to Leave Crude Oil.”

1) Read labels and, generally, don’t purchase products that list “fragrance” as an ingredient. This word is usually code for “toxic petroleum byproducts.” Manufacturers can include a number of toxicants in their products under the “fragrance” umbrella without naming them specifically. The law protects their trade secrets, but not your health.

2) There are some gray areas about guideline #1. Knowledgeable staff at our local natural foods source, the Keweenaw Co-op, recently told me that some companies now use the term “natural fragrance” in their ingredients list to mean essential oils (often following this term with a list of specific essential oils in parentheses). However, since the term has no legal definition, it does not guarantee the absence of synthetic compounds in the products. In cases like these, you can only be sure by contacting the manufacturer, by phone or online.

3) Check body care products again the Environmental Working Group’s excellent online database, Skin Deep. I suggest only using the products they rate as green.

4) Instead of scented products, use fragrance-free. As the number of people with perfume allergies has grown, the quantity of fragrance-free choices for body-care products and other consumer products such as household cleaners has increased. For household cleaners, I like the Free and Clear line made by Seventh Generation.

5) If you must use fragrance, use only true essential oils.

6) Don’t use air fresheners: they’re loaded with neurotoxic synthetics. In fact, I can’t think of another product with a more oxymoronic name. Air fresheners are some of the biggest polluters of indoor air around.

7) Consider feeding your face rather than crude-oiling it. By this I mean using food products as cosmetics. Somewhere I heard the maxim, “Don’t put anything on your skin that you wouldn’t eat,” and I think it’s a good idea. When it comes to fragrance, foods have gentle and natural scents that can serve as enough of a perfume. For instance, I use organic virgin coconut oil as a moisturizer, which leaves behind a very faint but lovely tropical aroma. The sheen it creates when first applied soaks in after a few minutes, leaving a slightly shiny, dewy look on skin.

Whether you quit perfume to reduce petroleum use or forego fragrance for health reasons, I hope the suggestions above will help. I invite you to add your own ideas in the comments section below. My thanks to the authors whose research I cited here.

Books at North Coast Holistics

I sell books through North Coast Holistics, and it's one of the things I most enjoy doing. There's great satisfaction in connecting a person with a good or useful book. I don't carry a lot of titles, but those I do sell are carefully selected.

In keeping with North Coast Holistic's theme of "healthy solutions for people and planet," the books I sell fall mostly into two categories: green living and natural health. I don't have regular retail hours, but have opted instead to sell books at events like the community classes I've sponsored, or in person at appointments. I'm considering selling books online, as well. People in the Houghton-Hancock area can look at these books before buying -- often an advantage -- by getting in touch with me and arranging to drop by.

To give you an idea of what's available through North Coast Holistics, I've listed some of the titles I stock below. Whether you decide to get one of these from me or elsewhere, you can consider my carrying it an endorsement of the book.

Prescriptions for a Healthy House: A Practical Guide for Architects, Builders and Homeowners, by Paula Baker-LaPorte, Erica Elliott, and John Banta

Homes That Heal and Those That Don't: How Your Home May Be Harming Your Family's Health, by Athena Thompson

The Sick House Survival Guide: Simple Steps to Healthier Homes, by Angela Hobbs

The Homeowner's Guide to Renewable Energy: Achieving Energy Independence Through Solar, Wind, Biomass, and Hydropower, by Dan Chiras

Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings, by Jennifer Thorne Amann, Alex Wilson & Katie Ackerly

The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles Over Motors, by Tamara Dean

Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, by Katie Alvord

A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places, essays edited by Thomas Reed Petersen

Public Health SOS: The Shadow Side of the Wireless Revolution, by Camilla Rees and Magda Havas

Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, by Stacy Malkan

Naturally Clean: The Seventh Generation Guide to Safe and Healthy, Non-Toxic Cleaning, by Jeffrey Hollender and Geoff Davis

The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, by Albert Bates

The Eco-Foods Guide: What's Good for the Earth is Good for You, by Cynthia Barstow

The Veggie Queen: Vegetables Get the Royal Treatment, with More Than 100 Seasonal Recipes, by Jill Nussinow

Eat Safe: The Truth about Food Additives from Aspartame to Xanthan Gum, by Bill Statham

The Acid-Alkaline Food Guide: A Quick Reference to Foods and Their Effect on pH Levels, by Dr. Susan E. Brown and Larry Trivieri, Jr.

Yoga for Suits: 30 No-Sweat Power Poses to Do in Pinstripes, by Edward Vilga

Yoga in Bed: 20 Asanas to Do in Pajamas, by Edward Vilga


I'll review some of these books in future posts. In the meantime, don't hesitate to get in touch if you want to know more.