Archive for the ‘health’ Category

Do you avoid drinking out of clear plastic water bottles, using antiperspirants with aluminum, or cooking in non-stick pans? Use a water purifier and ionizer everywhere you go, always buy organic, mind your cold-water fish list, and have your tap water checked yearly?

If so, we've found either a new source of anxiety in your life or a handy tool to factor into your next car purchase.

HealthyStuff.org is a relatively new information portal for the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Ecology Center, which uses an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) device to test interior components in vehicles for substances "with known toxicity, persistence, and tendency to...

The anti-car movement insists that automobiles have made us fat and lazy -- and there's some truth to that. However, a new study in the Journal of Urban Health shows that being carless doesn't always mean being healthier. Of the 2,156 individuals studied, car owners weighed about 8.5 pounds more than their carless colleagues -- the exception being when carless people lived in neighborhoods full of fast food restaurants. In those cases, not having a car meant about 2.7 pounds more body weight. So, lesson of the day: not having a car is fine until you start walking to Mickey D's instead of the gym. [JUH via Autoblog]

Do you have an old tin of car wax, or a bottle of car-wash concentrate that’s more than a few years old? Don’t use it; they likely contain so-called volatile organic compounds (VOC), which are dangerous for health and the environment. They've been tightly regulated by California and have been reduced steadily over the years.

Among the other products to watch out for are brake-dust-removing wheel cleaners, which have changed significantly in formulation in recent years to cut the presence of VOCs.

According to Dmitri Stanich of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the regulations have greatly reduced VOCs, along with some other...