As many of you know by now, Bisphenol-A is a chemical that is found in many plastic bottles, known to have many dangerous health effects. Recently, the FDA has taken some action to recognizing a fact that the medical and scientific community has known for a long time:

According to the GoodGuide:

For a long time, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been very slow in acting on emerging chemical concerns. As many GoodGuide users have heard, Bisphenol-A is increasingly associated with a range of human health impacts, particularly on child development. Just last week, a new US study concluded that BPA exposure at even very low levels could exacerbate adult heart disease. In response to consumer demands, many plastic bottle manufacturers are voluntarily eliminating BPA from their products.

Yet, under President Bush, the agency insisted in an assessment in 2008 that BPA was safe. Scientists charged that the FDA had selectively used research and used criteria that favored industry-funded studies. Last year, facing much public criticism, FDA promised to review the latest scientific evidence. The agency repeatedly delayed the report’s release for months. Finally, on January 15, FDA officials said that they had “some concern” about BPA’s safety.

Despite the growing evidence of BPA’s toxicity, the FDA says that it currently lacks the power to regulate the chemical. This is in part because BPA is “generally recognized as safe” for use in food, a ruling that was made over 40 years ago and that cannot be easily challenged.

A leading environmental health expert, Peterson Myers says,

“Most scientists actively involved in BPA research would observe that this is a baby step in the right direction: good, but insufficient.”

Myers thinks that the BPA decision may mean that the FDA is overhauling its approach to evaluating chemical risks. Still, the FDA has not yet even looked at the very latest data, with new studies appearing weekly. Congress needs to empower the agency to review its antiquated “generally recognized as safe” list.

In the meantime, what can you do to protect yourself from this chemical?

Here are some tips from the Environmental Working Group:

Safer products and uses: When possible it is best to avoid #7 plastics, especially for children’s food. Plastics with the recycling labels #1, #2 and #4 on the bottom are safer choices and do not contain BPA. Find baby bottles in glass versions, or those made from the safer plastics including polyamine, polypropylene and polyethylene. Soft or cloudy-colored plastic does not contain BPA. Bottles used to pump and store expressed breast milk by the brand Medela are also labeled BPA-free.

Many metal water bottles are lined with a plastic coating that contains BPA. Look for stainless steel bottles that do not have a plastic liner.

While the levels of BPA that leach from hard plastics is generally low, we recommend avoiding use of plastic containers to heat food in microwaves. Ceramic, glass, and other microwaveable dishware are good alternatives. Avoid using old and scratched plastic bottles.

I just read this great article/review from Josey Vogels that I wanted to share with you. It’s about properly grieving the end of a relationship in order to move forward, baggage-free:

“There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

“Time heals all wounds.”

“Get over it.”

You’ve heard ‘em all right? Russell Friedman and John W. James say jaunty phrases like these are the worst words of advice for handling a breakup. “The attempt to soothe is always well intentioned but rarely helpful,” say the authors of Moving On: Dump Your Relationship Baggage and Make Room for the Love of Your Life.

Despite its oh-god-not-another-one-of-those-books title, this is one of the best relationship books to have crossed my desk in a while (and trust me, a lot of them cross my desk).

Rather than spend a lot of time splicing, dicing and trying to spice up the failing relationships we’re currently in, Friedman and James, founders of the Grief Recovery Institute have applied techniques they’ve used to help clients deal with death to help people deal with the one thing they rarely do when they enter into a new relationship: That is, properly say good-bye to all the other crappy relationships that have gone before.

“A breakup is the death of a relationship,” says Friedman. “And just as when someone dies, you’re suddenly robbed of all the hopes, dreams and expectations you had for the future with that person.” Then we drag all that disappointment, anger and resentment (because of course, the relationship death was all the other’s person’s, right?) into our next relationship. After a few rounds of this, it’s no wonder so many of us can’t make the damn things work. In fact, says Friedman, the 50% divorce rate is nothing compared to the 70 per cent of relationships that fail outside of marriage.

Friedman and James partly blame our society’s discomfort with feelings of sadness.“By the time a child is 15 years old he or she will have received more than 23 thousand messages that sad or painful feelings should not be communicated to others,” they write.

Pet fish dies? Don’t worry honey, there are plenty more fish in the, er, pet fish store. Hurt son? Suck it up and get over it. All that stuff we learn about feeling bad or sad gets packed into the suitcase and hauled into adulthood and into our relationships.

Relationship ends? Don’t worry; you can get a new one. Heart hurtin’ like someone’s shoved it full of broken glass? Suck it up and get over it.

But the new fish/relationship isn’t a replacement for the old one, say the authors. Relationships aren’t replaceable or interchangeable. Each is unique and need to be experienced, completed and mourned differently.

And that old, “time heals all” bit? Friedman and James liken this advice to expecting time to fill a flat tire with air. To take the analogy further, imagine you continue driving on that flat tire while you’re waiting for time to fill it up again. It would make driving in a straight line really hard and eventually, you’d destroy the rim and the wheel.

So just like you need to take action to fill up your tire before you can more forward (like call a tow truck or use a jack and fix it yourself), we need to take action in order to refill our emotional flat tires and move forward into healthier, happier relationships.

The action the authors suggest is something they call the “past relationship review,” an exercise that forces you to formally review past relationships and be honest with yourself about the good, the bad and the ugly of each one. But the process isn’t just an intellectual one. “We know people who can recite a doctoral thesis on what happened and who did what to whom but still aren’t emotionally complete,” says Friedman.

Their suggested process, if done honestly and openly, allows you to “complete” past relationships by forgiving your exes for their shit and apologizing for your own so you don’t end up dragging all that “unfinished emotional business” into subsequent relationships.

But he was a bastard and I’ll never be able to forgive him, you say. Forgiving doesn’t condone the person’s behaviour, says Friedman. Not forgiving, however, makes it impossible to move on. “Not forgiving keeps you in prison and not them,” he says.

In fact, forgiveness has nothing to do with the other person. “It’s only for you, to set you free,” says Friedman.

Which is why the authors are so adamant about the fact that none of this process be shared with your exes. They mean it. This is strictly a personal exercise. Suddenly calling him up to tell him you forgive him for being such a jerk isn’t going to inflate anyone’s tires.

Friedman likens the process to scraping old paint off a house to prepare it for a fresh coat.

And, once you’re ready for it, they’ve got some great advice for making that fresh coat last.

For more info or to order the book, go to relationshipbaggage.com.

The instinct to survive is strong - even at a young age. This story is a truly amazing tale of how an infant managed to stay alive amidst a horrible ordeal:

On January 12th, when the earthquake struck Haiti,  Nadine Devilme saw her 2-month-old daughter Jenny Alexis collapse through the floor of the house while in her babysitter’s arms. Both the sitter and the baby were buried beneath the rubble, and there was no reason to believe that the fragile infant would have survived.

But five days later, rescue workers came across an astonishing sight beneath the debris: although Jenny’s babysitter had died, the baby was still clinging to life.

“She had a fracture to her skull, she had broken ribs, she had difficulty breathing,” Jenny’s doctor, Dr. Arthur Fournier, told The Times. “So the first miracle was that she had the heart, the courage, to survive by herself for five days.”

However, odds were slim that Jenny would survive if she stayed in Haiti, where many of the medical facilities had been damaged or destroyed by the earthquake. So Dr. Fournier fought through red tape to allow the injured baby to be airlifted to the US, where she would have the greatest level of care.

With medical attention, Jenny’s condition soon improved, but that wasn’t the end of the trouble: her parents were forced to take DNA tests to prove parenthood, but even after finding that they were a match, they were not permitted to come to the US because they didn’t have the necessary visas.

Finally, the State Department permitted an exception, and allowed Jenny’s parents to come to Florida for one year on humanitarian parole. Yesterday, they were overjoyed to finally hold their baby girl again, covering her in kisses.

“Everything that happened here was a miracle,” Jenny’s father said through a translator. “Jenny faced death and when we learnt Jenny was alive we were very happy and couldn’t stop crying. Every day after that, we have thanked God that she was alive.”

Source: Gimundo

Positive news starts with yourself. When you feel more positive, a ripple effect takes place, with far-reaching consequences.

Here are a few pointers from an article in Stepcase Lifehack. They may seem rather basic but essentially, feeling positive is pretty simple if you allow it to be so. The great part? Some small changes can make a big difference.

1. Appreciate as much as you can. This is one of those very simple things you can do to bring more positivity in to your life. I have also found appreciation to be a great way to turn an angry, sad and frustrated mood around to a more positive one.

2. Stop comparing yourself to others. If you don´t then you´ll just create a lot of unnecessary pain in your life. If you pass one person then you´ll just find another person more successful than you. And your brief sense of being a winner will transform once again into anxiety, fear, tummy-aches and possibly heart-attacks.

3. Realize that it is possible to choose how you react. You don´t have live your life in reaction. You have a choice. There is always a gap between stimuli and reaction. If you focus on that gap it will widen and although it might seem in the beginning like stimuli and your reaction are tied together that is not the case.

4. Educate yourself. Self-education can be a great help to live a more positive life. Read great books on the areas of your life you want to improve. Maybe it’s it your financial situation. Or your health. Or your relationships. Ask people with more success in that area than you what they did to improve.

5. Act as if. Your emotions work backwards too. So even if you don´t feel positive, confident, calm or decisive you can act like it. And after you have done that for a few minutes, guess what happens? You will actually start to feel positive, confident, calm or decisive.

6. Live in the now. Don´t let your thoughts drift into the past or future more than necessary. It’s often a sure-fire way to start negative loops of thoughts in your mind.

7. Do some mental rehearsal. This is great way to improve your performance and decrease anxiety in any upcoming situation. Maybe you´re heading into a meeting soon. Then visualize now how great the events will unfold – see and hear it – and also how great will you feel at this meeting.

8. Redefine failure. Michael Jordan once said: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

9. Focus on what you want, not on what you don´t want. One common problem is to focus your thoughts on what you don´t want rather than what you want. If you do that then it will be hard to get what you want in life. If you want to improve your finances then focus on having a great financial situation rather than your lack of money and your debts.

Recently Steve Jobs gave the 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address. He relayed three stories to his audience which seemed rather simple on some levels but had far-reaching implications. Watch it online at the link above or read below for an excerpt from Psychology Today:

The first story he told was about dropping out of Reed College. More exactly, he stopped paying tuition for classes he didn’t like but stayed on campus, dropping in on classes he did like. One of these was a calligraphy class. The relevance of this chance event is in front of me as I write this blog entry and in front of you as you read it: different fonts for computer text and proportional spacing, innovations introduced by Jobs years later that made the first Macintosh computer the apple of so many people’s eye. The point? Jobs told his audience to connect the dots in life, appreciating that you cannot do so looking forward. You can only do so when looking back. And you need faith - optimism? - that someday the dots will connect.

The second story he told was about getting fired from Apple Computers, the company that he had co-founded. Talk about coupling insult with injury! But hurt and dismayed though he was, Jobs realized that he still loved what he was doing, so he kept doing it. He founded Pixar. He founded NeXT, which was then acquired by Apple, and you know the rest of the story. The point? Find something that you love to do, because “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

The third story was about his experience with pancreatic cancer, which made his own mortality more than an abstraction. According to Jobs, “Death is very likely the single best invention of life” because it allows you to sidestep the trap of thinking you have something to lose. The point? Jobs reported that he often asks himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” When the answer is no for too many days in a row, he knows he needs to change something.

"To me it was a total God thing," said Nelson

Sometimes Mother Nature intervenes. Whether it’s a storm that keeps you happily housebound or a walk in the woods that soothes your harried soul, nature can pop up and aid you in more ways then we probably even notice. In this case, she was more than noticeable!

Last Sunday, professional surfer Jodie Nelson took to the water for a grueling standup-paddle ride from Santa Catalina Island to Dana Point—a distance of almost 40 miles—as a fundraiser to fight breast cancer for the Keep A Breast Foundation. The nine-hour paddle was difficult, but during her journey, Nelson received moral support from a completely unexpected source: a 30-foot minke whale.

The whale, which Nelson nicknamed “Larry,” surfaced while she was fighting off exhaustion during her long trip. And he didn’t just pop his head up once—Larry obviously took a liking to Nelson and her 14-foot paddleboard, as he decided to splash and roll around her for a full two hours while she paddled. Providing endless entertainment, Nelson’s huge new friend made the journey go far more easily.

Although minke whales aren’t often spotted off the coast of Southern California, Nelson believes that Larry visited her for a reason. “We prayed at 4 that morning that God would reveal his beauty and creation and nature, and allow me to endure this long trek, so for me it’s not such a huge surprise that this happened,” she told Grind TV.

Breast cancer is a cause near and dear to Nelson’s heart, as both her mother and sister are survivors. Before Larry’s arrival, she’d been disappointed that she’d only managed to raise $6,000 for the Keep A Breast Foundation. Some of the celebrity endorsements she’d been counting on had fallen through, and she thought she would fall far short of her $100,000 goal.

But Nelson’s new whale friend could be all the star power she needs. “I thought, ‘I don’t need so-and-so,’” she. “Because I honestly feel like Larry is going to help us reach the $100,000 mark with our fundraising effort.”

Looks like she was right: as of today, Nelson’s donation page shows $100,333 in contributions. If you want to contribute even more to the cause, you can make a donation at FirstGiving. (Larry will thank you for it.)

Source: Gimundo