food

Improve Your Fitness by Being Simple

- Adam Clare 4 Comments

Unsurprisingly being fit and staying fit is easy for some people and not so easy for others. If you are finding it difficult to maintain a healthy body because you don’t have access to proper equipment there is no reason you can’t work out minimally. Zen Habits has an article on how to have a minimalist workout.

It takes no equipment to get a great workout and get in shape, and with one or two pieces of simple equipment, you can turn that great workout into a fantastic one, you magnificent beast, you.
And with little or no equipment required for a fantastic workout, you can do it at home, or wherever you are. Even if you’re in solitary confinement.
It’s hard not to find time for this type of workout — you can do it while watching TV, for goodness sake!

Not into working out for your fitness? Well there are other things that you can do, in fact 25 things you can do to improve your health.

11. Get friends that live healthy
The ongoing interaction with people who have the health you desire will be a positive influence on you. It is far easier to make the transition to healthy living when you have the social support.

12. Find healthy foods you enjoy
Just because you are eating healthy does not mean you need to suffer eating foods you hate. Look for healthy foods you enjoy and eat them more often. Find recipes online that are both healthy and enjoyable.

13. Take your lunch to work
Not only will brown bagging your lunch save you some money, it will help you avoid eating unhealthy foods for lunch. Take the extra time to make your lunch in the morning or make extra for dinner and eat the leftovers.

Save the Environment: Don’t Eat Meat

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Yes, I’m a vegetarian, and yes I think most people should be; however, will I force you to be vegetarian? – not yet. In fact, I only discuss why I’m veggie when asked (with the obvious exception of posting here). One reason I love not eating animals is that it’s really awesome for the environment to not feed animals in the first place. Oh, the irony. An article from Alternet sheds some light on how not eating meat is great for the environment.

Even more hidden from public view is the role of animal feeding in global warming. The shocking fact is that production of beef, pork and poultry is a bigger part of the climate problem than the cars and trucks we drive, indeed of the whole transportation sector. In our fantasies — and ads — we see contented cows eating grass, but the fact is all but a lucky few spend much of their lives in dismal feedlots where grass does not grow, getting fat on corn and other unspeakable byproducts. Internationally, two-thirds of the earth’s available agricultural land is used to raise animals and their feed crops, primarily corn and soybeans, and the trend is accelerating as people in Latin America and Asia increasingly demand an Americanized diet rich in meat. The need to grow more animal feed and more animals has been devastating rainforests and areas like Brazil’s Cerrado region, the world’s most biologically diverse savannah, long before the demand for biofuels began escalating.

It’s What We Eat

Vegetarians have long understood this issue, but asking the American public to eat less meat is still a radical idea, politically untouchable. Yet the meat industry is a giant source of greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is only one, and not the most dangerous one. All those steer feedlots and factory buildings crammed with pigs and chickens produce immense amounts of animal wastes that give off methane. On an equivalent basis to carbon dioxide, methane is twenty-three times more potent as a greenhouse gas. When you add in the production of fertilizer and other aspects of animal farming (including land use changes, feed transport, etc.) livestock farming is responsible for nearly one-fifth of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, more than the transportation sector, according to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

DIY Sustainable Food Shopping

- Adam Clare

The Green Grok has a good video that shows how anyone can eat in a sustainable way.

Tesco Labels Food with Carbon Footprint

- Adam Clare

In Feburary the New Yorker looked into the complexity of carbon footprint labeling of food, and the article spent a lot of time looking at Tesco’s efforts. The most important point from that article (I think) is that it sometimes makes environmental sense to eat food shipped from other parts of the world. Eating locally is not always the best thing to do.

For British consumers eating environmentally will be easier now. Tesco is about to test their carbon labelling program. One of Tesco’s goals in doing this is to create an industry standard.

The retailer will put carbon-count labels on varieties of orange juice, potatoes, energy-efficient light bulbs and washing detergent, stating the quantity in grammes of CO2 equivalent put into the atmosphere by their manufacture and distribution.

Chief executive Sir Terry Leahy said: “We will give the carbon content of the product and the category average.” The labels should eventually allow shoppers to compare carbon costs in the same way they can now compare salt and calorie content.

The UK’s biggest supermarket first announced its intention to put carbon counts on up to 70,000 products some 15 months ago. It has since been working with the Carbon Trust to find an accurate method of labelling. “It has not been simple, but we are there,” said Leahy yesterday. Tesco will unveil the details of the scheme shortly, and the chief executive said he hoped the labels “will end up being a standard”.

Feed the Birds to Help them Mate

- Adam Clare

Birds make nice music, and the birds that there are the more music that is created. To indirectly produce more music one should then feed birds. A recent released study came to the conclusion that feeding birds over the winter helps them procreate.

Those that were given extra food laid eggs earlier and, although the same number of chicks hatched, on average one more successfully fledged per clutch. Although it was well known that feeding birds during winter increases their survival, this is the first time that the benefits to subsequent breeding have been shown.

Leading the research, Gillian Robb, from Queen’s University School of Biological Sciences said “Our study shows that birds that receive extra food over winter lay their eggs earlier and produce more fledglings.”

Dr Stuart Bearhop from the University of Exeter, who supervised the research, said “We show that extra food provided in winter helps the birds that take it, however, we are still unclear whether it has a knock on effect on other species. Nevertheless, I will certainly be continuing to feed the birds in my garden for the rest of the winter.”

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