While I would encourage you to read both “Sunscreens Exposed” and the FAQs, I will summarize the most cogent facts for you here:

• Clothing, not sunscreen, should be your first choice to protect your skin. There seems to be a lack of consensus onwhether sunscreen prevents cancer and there is some evidence that it may actually cause cancer (for a variety of interesting reasons), so rely on clothing as your first line of defense. In other words, you might look hot in that bikini now, but payback’s a bitch.
• As with anything you put on your skin, choose a natural product. Sunscreens are rife with hormone disruptors such as oxybenzone, parabens, and phthalates, not to mention a slew of other chemicals that the wary consumer would do well to avoid.
• When you do use sunscreen, choose mineral rather than chemical protection. Zinc offers broad-spectrum protection and is the safest, cleanest, and most effective choice. Titanium dioxide comes in close second, as it offers the same benefits as zinc except that it’s not as clean…
• Resist the urge to go for the oh-so-convenient spray bottle. Titanium dioxide is dangerous when inhaled.
• Avoid Vitamin A. Data shows that Vitamin A is likely a photocarcinogen, as it seems to spur the growth of cancer when it’s combined with sunlight. Vitamin A in the synthetic form retinyl palmitate is in 41% of all sunscreens.
• Don’t count on SPF ratings. Think of SPF as an advertising stratagem, not a scientific rating. SPF measures UVB (sunburn) protection – it tells the consumer nothing about protection from UVA rays. UVA protection in U.S. sunscreens maxes out at about 15 regardless of the SPF on the bottle.
• Apply adequately and frequently. SPF effectiveness also heavily depends on proper application. Applying half the recommended amount of an SPF 50 sunscreen will only provide SPF 7 protection! Inadequate and infrequent application can also cause free-radical damage. While SPF ratings range from 15 to 50, equivalent “free radical protection factors” fall at only about 2.

EWG researchers recommend only 39 – 8 percent – of 500 beach and sport sunscreens for this season. Check out their list of top sunscreens.

I recommend Badger, as it is made from natural ingredients and is the safest of all the ones I looked at. Thanks to Money Saving Mom, I got it shipped from Medco.com the other day for only $6.99 with their $10 off any purchase coupon!

And, yes, those appear to be breasts (or, more accurately, “boob sacks”) attached to her mid-section.

The first is Skin Deep, the Environmental Working Group’s cosmetic safety database.  I’ve always been a label reader, but for all my years of practice identifying chemicals I try to avoid, I still need help.  Though the database was first released in 2004, I didn’t discover it until 2007 when EWG released their improved and expanded current edition.  I was elated.  No more wandering the chemical engineering world (which is actually more like a galaxy) searching for credible, coherent information on suspected and known toxins.  While Skin Deep isn’t perfect, it is an incredibly informative and easy to use free resource.  You can search for any cosmetic product, discover its toxicity score, read about its individual ingredients, and more.  Your skin is a living organ that absorbs most of what you put on it – get informed!

The second is the Guide to Less Toxic Products from the Environmental Health Association of Nova Scotia.  This I stumbled upon serendipitously a few years ago.  I use this guide mostly for household cleaners, but it also covers personal care and baby care  (pest control is coming soon!).  It lists less toxic alternatives for each item, but I find the numerous recipes for home-made alternatives the most helpful.  Methinks Nova Scotia must be pretty cool.

Lastly, don’t forget the Pesticide Action Network’s What’s On My Food?, which I’ve covered separately here.

A visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s.

Here, the black void represents McDonald’s, but the other colors represent burger chains that locally contest the power of the Golden Arches.

I have yet to subscribe to an RSS feed, though; honestly, I will admit that I don’t really have any idea what the hell that really IS or how it could better my life.  It’s one of those terms I see every day but constantly file away in the Abstract/Non-Tangible Technological Miscellany cabinet of my mind under the label “Hm.”  Also filed here you’d find minimal documentation regarding VPNs, Re-Tweets, The PING Command, and Cache/Caching.

Anyway, I’ve found a new blog that I want to share with you.

I came across my newest read on GOOD, another favorite, which posted a Q&A with Mrs. Q yesterday.  Mrs. Q is the anonymous author of Fed Up: School Lunch Project, in which she, a teacher, chronicles her commitment to eat school lunch every day in 2010.  Her project, a more realistic take on the “Super-Size Me” idea, aims to encourage schools to reconsider what and how they feed their students.

Mrs. Q’s nauseating undercover camera-phone shots of the cafeteria food, as well as her constant fear of being found out and fired, make for quite an addicting read!

If you just aren’t a from-scratch person, pay an artisan – not Hallmark – to do the crafty work for you.

I really kind of hate New Year’s resolutions.  Mostly because of me, not them.  Honestly, I never make them because I know I won’t keep them.  This will be the first I’ve ever made, so I better come through on it, I guess.  Don’t worry about me if I don’t, though.  One of my best traits is that I pretty much never feel guilty about anything.

This is where the self-helpers/self-improvers out there begin to pity me.  (From now on, I will refer to these types of folks as Hel-Imps, because I feel clever right now.)  Here’s my interpretation of their pity: “She’s never kept, much less made, any resolution in her life?!  I guess she’s never run a marathon, then.  Sweet Moses, how does she live with herself?!”  I just do.  And it’s awesome.

My stereotyping here comes from real life experience, of course.  All Hel-Imps I have ever known are obsessed with running marathons.  Why?  I don’t know, but I imagine it’s one of the things I’ll discover the answer to in heaven, along with a bunch of other, less important, things.

This guy I once worked for, who was one of the most extreme Hel-Imps I’ve ever known, and, therefore, loved to run marathons, once returned from a race in which two people died.  Yep, died.  From improving themselves.  Call me lazy, but I don’t really want to improve myself TO DEATH.

Death by self-improvement seems counter-productive, at best.  If a person has improved so much that it results in death, haven’t they really just gone full circle back to a most unimproved state?  I imagine so.

Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why is Beth anti-marathon?”  I’m not…exactly.  I am, however, having a hostile day, and I will absolutely never understand the point of marathon running.  It can’t be for the love of running.  One can run any where, any time.  Run with your dog, run while pushing your kid in a jogging stroller, run in the park.  I’m very pro-running.  I run a couple times a year.  I even have some awesome family friends who run marathons in Europe (which is cooler), but they are not Hel-Imps.

This leads me to conclude that my problem is not really with marathons, but rather with Hel-Imps.  It seems to me that all the Hel-Imps I’ve known run marathons just so they can say they have, and so they can find a way to drop the statement “I’m training for a marathon” into every conversation.  It’s the pinnacle of Hel-Impishness.  And, I guess it’s just not as cool to scrapbook a page for “The Day I Ran Around My Neighborhood for Six Hours”.

Anyhoo… water.  I’m going to start drinking the recommended daily amount – half my body weight in ounces.  Which is 55 (just kidding).

I figure one can’t even feign health if they’re not drinking enough water.  And, seeing as last year sucked for me in the health department, water-drinking seems like a wise and reasonable goal.

Oh.  I also plan to pee a lot.  If I keep my first resolution, this one should be easy enough.

Back in May of this year, a web site called Sugar Stacks was launched to help consumers actually visualize the amount of sugar found in common food items.  They use “regular sugar cubes (4 grams of sugar each) to show how the sugars in your favorite foods literally stack up, gram for gram”.

Note that they don’t differentiate between different types of sugar, they just use cubes of white sugar as a visual aid.

Um, I’m speechless.  Just…wow.  Please, I hope she doesn’t procreate.

Once upon a time, Ben and I were optimistic that Mr. President would appoint advisers who aren’t actually Corporate Tools, especially in the long-villainous ag and food departments.  But alas, “hope” and “change” are not to be applied across the board.

Monsanto is a whole other blog (or series of blogs).  But, in case you are unfamiliar, I’ll explain that I have no greater disdain for any other American entity (and that is saying something).  In reading and learning about American health, food, and farming one inevitably comes across Monsanto many times.  And let me tell you, their story reads like an unreal, pre-apocalyptic sci-fi horror story.  You just wouldn’t even believe.

But alas, these are the people making policy.  So it goes.