Keeping Your Food and Water Safe

There are a lot of food containers on the market, and some contain questionable chemicals. Get the low-down on which food and beverage containers contain BPA, and the best containers in which to store your foods.... Read more

Restaurant Portions

When you go out to dinner, do you know what you're getting yourself into?

Planning Our First Allergen-Free Halloween

By Sean Kelley

By mid-August my wife had already purchased Halloween-themed T-shirts for herself and our kids. She also began rotating at least 10 different sets of Halloween hospital scrubs into her wardrobe at our local children’s hospital. And did I mention that she heads up the Halloween decorating committee on her surgical unit’s floor? Yeah, she’s a Halloween freak.

Forget Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving, or our wedding anniversary; October 31 is her favorite day of the year. But this year, her enthusiasm has been curbed by our son’s multiple food allergies. Read More

Kate explores ways for gourmet cooks to save a few dollars

Do you consider yourself a gourmet cook? If so, you're a retailer's dream consumer. During this time of obese gas prices and ballooning inflation, households with a gourmet cook smell especially sweet to food and lifestyle businesses.
A Nielsen survey of 27,000 consumer panel homes in March 2008 shows:

• A gourmet cook lives in 1 of every 5 households


• A disproportionate percentage of gourmet cooks have household incomes of $100,000 or more


• They tend to live in large cosmopolitan centers or affluent suburban areas


• The household head works as a professional or manager Continue Reading >>

THE KITCHEN PHYSICIAN: Medicinal Foods

Medicinal Foods
by Carolyn Swicegood
"Let your food be your medicine" said Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, who compiled a list of over four hundred herbs and their uses. Herbs, spices and other nutritional substances are the oldest form of medicine known to man. While modern or "allopathic" medicine is barely a century old, the practice of natural medicine using nature as a pharmacy can be traced back through all of the ancient civilizations. Over many centuries, man's experiment with plants has yielded a vast stock of natural medicines to help us heal many ailments, and almost always without harmful side effects. Many pharmaceuticals are still derived from the extracts of wild plants, such as digitalis from the purple foxglove flower. Amazingly enough, less than one percent of the over two hundred and fifty thousand plant species on earth have even been studied for their medicinal properties!

Many of the herbs, spices and foods that our grandmothers used as preventative and curative measures can be used for the same purpose in the care of our parrots. Through the years, numerous aviculturists have quietly employed these natural means of keeping their birds healthy. Unfortunately, there are no avian books to guide us in this usage, and of course, dosages and amounts are always the key issue. Although I have studied the use of herbs for over twenty years, I am not a veterinarian and cannot recommend medical treatments for parrots. However, you can find many excellent books on this subject to guide you. Again, the proper dosage is of paramount importance even when using natural substances. One method of judging the correct amount of an herb for a parrot is to determine the appropriate dosage for a human infant and then calculate the dosage for the bird by percentage of weight. For example, a parrot weighing one pound would need approximately one tenth of the amount given a human infant weighing ten times that (ten pounds). Most herbs do not have the toxic side effects of pharmaceutical compounds, so even if the dosage administered is not precise, the consequences are not likely to be as serious. Continue Reading >>

Victoria Boutenko Interview 2

Part 2 of an interview with raw food expert Victoria Boutenko. With subtitles in several languages.

Super Food & Health Food, Sprouts, Nutrition by Natalie

Super Food & Health Food, Sprouts, Nutrition by Natalie