Household consumer products injure 33.1 million people in the United States every year. These incidents cost $800 billion in related expenses from death, injury or property damages. And many scientists are starting to believe that, in particular, the chemicals found in a wide variety of the goods you use every day may be more toxic than previously thought. Here are 10 of the most common products that may be hazardous to your health:

10. Mothballs

Since moths chew holes through clothing and other textiles, people pack away these stinky repellents to kill them. But studies on one active ingredient in some repellents, paradichlorobenzene, found that it can cause cancer in animals. Other types of moth balls use naphthalene, which after prolonged exposure can damage or destroy red blood cells, and which can also stimulate nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

9. Pesticides

Ninety percent of households in the United States use some form of pesticide, a broad term that encompasses a variety of chemical formulas that kill everything from tiny microorganisms up to rodents. In 2006, the American Association of Poison Control Centers received nearly 46,000 calls regarding children under 5 years old who had been exposed to potentially toxic levels of pesticides.

8. Pressed Wood Products

This faux wood takes bits and pieces of logs and wood leftovers and combines them together. Pressed wood products include paneling, particle board, fiberboard and insulation, all of which were particularly popular for home construction in the 1970's. However, the glue that holds the wood particles in place may use urea-formaldehyde as a resin. The U.S. EPA estimates that this is the largest source of formaldehyde emissions indoors. Formaldehyde exposure can set off watery eyes, burning eyes and throat, difficulty breathing and asthma attacks. Scientists also know that it can cause cancer in animals. The risk is greater with older pressed wood products, since newer ones are better regulated.

7. Chemicals in Carpets

­Indoor carpeting has recently come under greater scrutiny because of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) associated with new carpet installation. The glue and dyes used with carpeting are known to emit VOCs, which can be harmful to your health in high concentrations. However, the initial VOC emissions will often subside after the first few days following.

6. Laser Printers Chemicals

­­A 2007 study found that some laser printers give off ultra fine particles that can cause serious health problems. Another study confirmed that laser and ink-jet printers can release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and ozone particulates. All of these have been linked with heart and lung disease.

5. Lead Paint

­In 1991, the U.S. government declared lead to be the greatest environmental threat to children. Even low concentrations can cause problems with your central nervous system, brain, blood cells and kidneys. It's particularly threatening for fetuses, babies and children, because of potential developmental disorders. Many houses built before 1978 contain lead paint. Once the paint begins to peel away will, it release the harmful lead particles that you can inhale.

4. Air Fresheners and Cleaning Solutions

­Air fresheners and cleaning solutions, when used excessively or in a small, unventilated area, can release toxic levels of pollutants. This comes from two main chemicals called ethylene-based glycol ethers and terpenes. While the EPA regards the ethers as toxic by themselves, the non-toxic terpenes can react with ozone in the air to form a poisonous combination. Air fresheners in particular are linked to many volatile organic compounds, such as nitrogen dioxide, and some fresheners also contain paradichlorobenzene, the same chemical emitted by mothballs.

3. Baby Bottles and BPA

Canada has taken the first steps to outlaw the sale of baby bottles made from polycarbonate plastics, which are the most common type on the market. It has done so because the plastics are made with a chemical called bisphenol-a (BPA). BPA has a structure very similar to estrogen and for that reason is referred to as a "hormone disruptor." Hormone disruptors can interfere with the natural human hormones, especially for young children.

2. Flame Retardants

Commonly used in mattresses, upholstery, television and computer casings and circuit boards, flame retardants use polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs for short. Two forms of PBDEs were phased out of use in manufacturing in the United States in 2004 because of related health threats, but the products containing them linger on. Studies have linked PBDEs to learning and memory problems, lowered sperm counts and poor thyroid functioning in rats and mice. Other animal studies have indicated that PBDEs could be carcinogenic in humans, although that has not yet been confirmed.

1. Cosmetic Phthalates

Phthalates, also called plasticizers, go into many products including hair spray, shampoos, fragrances, and deodorants. Phthalates bind the color and fragrance in cosmetic products, and are also used to increase the durability and flexibility of plastics. Like BPA, these hormone-like chemicals are linked to reproductive and developmental problems in animals. Because of these findings, California and Washington state have banned the use of phthalates in toys for younger children.

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...Grace is upon you so eat to live!

• If there's a choice, opt for plain instead of flavored. Although most of the flavoring is concentrated on the skin, which you'll probably discard, it does inordinately perfume the meat and accumulated chicken juices (which you may want to use if the recipe calls for broth).
   
  
• Look for a large, full-breasted chicken. It has more meat, of course, but it also has less waste and is less likely to dry out under a heat lamp or in a hot box. 
  
• Pull the chicken from the bone as soon as you get home. It's easier to separate while warm, it saves room in the fridge, and you can start your recipe without delay.
  
• If you have time, dump the bones, skin and accumulated juices into a soup kettle, barely cover with water, and bring to a simmer. In 30 minutes, you'll have a pot of stock that tastes like it's been simmering for hours. 
  
• Use shredded chicken to top pizzas, flavor pasta and rice, toss in salads, or beef up soups. I especially like it for curry and enchiladas - dishes I might not have time to make from scratch.

As both obesity and hunger are on the rise, new books show why we shouldn't feel guilty about our food choices but angry with a corrupt food system.

TV dinners were launched at a time when only a small percentage of Americans actually owned TVs. Thus, the meals, "were what people ate while they dreamed of affording one." In the American dream, we imagine, a place of bounty, yet the reality is that the breadbasket of America is rife with poverty and a declining life expectancy. The idyllic vision of quaint American farmland doesn't work like that except in fiction and there is perhaps no greater fiction than the comforting hand of the free market,  particularly as it pertains to food.

The Hidden Battle for the World Food System makes visible the people behind the abstraction and reveals a global food system that, with our complicity, continues to alienate farmers and consumers alike, all while fattening the pocketbooks of a few middlemen.

 The original supermarket was a cost-saving invention born around 1917, the same time as the U.S. was experiencing food riots. Retailers needed to be able to find a cheaper way of selling the same food to a public that demanded low prices because their incomes weren't increasing and the price of food was going through the roof.

There's a route through the supermarket that looks like an elementary rat in maze experiment where you enter one end of the supermarket and follow a path that takes you through everything that there is to offer. Saunders insisted that the store clerks not be allowed to talk to anyone. Their job was solely to make sure that things were filled high on the shelves. Instead, it was consumers who would do the assessment of goods and pile them into a cart or a basket and then pay for them at the end of this long maze. In other words, it was a very constrained and funneled environment.

  The resemblance to rats in cages in laboratories is more than cosmetic. The way that we shop today in supermarkets is profoundly manipulated. Everything about it is the result of millions of dollars in investments and experiments. Everything about it: the lighting, the positioning of things, the reason that the milk is always at the back, all of these are ways in which we're manipulated. The profound irony is that we go into supermarkets and we are made to believe that we choose freely but the moment we step through the doors of the supermarket, we have been made for our food. We are being crafted in that environment into people who will impulse purchase, will accept a range of fruits and vegetables that is very narrow, will think that when we pick between Coke and Pepsi, that that's real choice.

  Free markets in food and certainly global markets in food are a very new thing. They are barely 200 years old and their origins have everything to do with colonialism. The world's first free market in grain was the market in wheat in the 1880s. This market was forged in imperialism and conquest, particularly by the British over the grain baskets of South Asia.

The social safety nets that existed in India under feudal society had been knocked away by the British. If people couldn't afford food, they didn't get to eat and if they couldn't buy food, they starved. As a result of the imposition of markets in food, 13 million people across the world died in the 19th century. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism. Those are the origins of markets in food.

We shouldn't be surprised, then, that in those markets today, there are basically just a handful of corporations that control the truck and barter of goods. In any major market, you'll see that it's basically four or five corporations that control upwards of 50 percent of the market. In tea, it's just one corporation, Unilever, that controls 90 percent of the market and in coffee there are just a couple of firms that have 80 percent of the market.

 We've seen the price of coffee go up. You'd think that the people who would benefit from this must be the poor farmers who are growing the coffee. But if you look at the situation of coffee farmers, it's pretty precarious. In the book, I talk about a family that used to be able to sell dry coffee cherries for 69 cents per kilo. When I spoke to them, they were getting 14 cents per kilo. They are desperate because their land can't be turned to grow anything else. They either have to choose to walk away from their land and try and make a go of it in Kampala, the city, or they produce at a loss and hope things get better.

You can see the disproportion all the way up the food chain. The middleman will buy at 14 cents per kilo and sell at 19 cents. The mill will buy at 19 cents and sell at 24. Then it is bought by Nestle in West London where it will cost $1.64 per kilo and then it gets turned into instant coffee. By the time it comes out, it costs $26 per kilo - more than 200 times the cost of what it was in Uganda. That transformation suggests that whenever there's a price spike the benefits of that tend to accumulate in the parts of the food system where the most power is concentrated.

 The middlemen are frequently involved in price fixing. Archer Daniels Midland Is "the cartel that fixed the price of lysine and citric acid." These food corporations have in affect the market, particularly in corn?

It's an evolving scam. The fact that there is an American corn surplus was a strategic decision made by the U.S. government under some heavy influence from companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. But then we have this corn surplus and don't know what to do with it. Luckily, here are Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill who are prepared to turn it into high fructose corn syrup. Now, these companies have offered to turn the surplus into ethanol. They're convincing the government to part with billions of dollars to support a scheme that by any relevant scientific criterion is nuts. Biofuels take more energy to produce than they release and they produce more CO2 than they save.

 NAFTA was obviously pushed by the U.S. government, but they thought, quite reasonably, that exposing Mexican farmers to vast US agricultural subsidies under free trade agreements was going to be a recipe for disaster. The weird thing is that it was the Mexican government that said okay to liberalizing agriculture. It's unusual because it is, in many ways, against the interests of the majority of people living in rural areas. You've got to ask why it is that even when they could have levied substantial import tariffs to the tune of millions of dollars a year to be able to generate revenue from the import of American corn, they chose not to. Even under NAFTA they were allowed to make those taxes.

 NAFTA has resulted in a vast influx of American consumerism. For me, the two startling facts are firstly that Mexico is the world's second most obese country after America. Also, the closer you get to the American border from Mexico, the fatter Mexican teenagers are likely to be. I don't think people realize quite how much food culture and body image really matter.

The example that comes to mind is Fiji. Anorexia and bulimia were virtually non-existent before 1995 when television was beamed in. Within three years of predominately U.S. television, 12 percent of teenage Fijian girls were bulimic. That's batshit crazy yet I think we are so inured to all the advertising and food culture that is around us that it feels normal. There's nothing normal about it.

The fact that it seems normal is a sign that the food corporations in many ways of succeeded in their project. They have managed to convince us that most of the shit that we eat every day is food when it isn't. It's a profit for them and too often a poison for us.

 Farmers around the world, including the U.S., are suffering, there has been a boom in food processing, but over a million jobs have been lost in the farming and allied industries. Statistical indicators of welfare are some of the lowest in the rural areas of the U.S.

 And in fact there was an article that came out in a biology journal just a couple of days ago that showed that in the heartland, particularly for women, life expectancy rates are now falling. It had always been the case that one generation of Americans would live longer than their parents. Now that's being reversed, particularly for women, particularly in the poorest rural areas in the United States.

This is correlated with disinvestment in small, sustainable agriculture and a shifting of investment towards huge mega-farms. That means there is less money going to community schools, for example. It is almost always an augury of bad things when a rural school closes because, as a consequence, the rest of the rural community tends to fall apart. Rural schools have been closing hand over fist.

 There is this idea of middle America as being The Little House on the Prairie. It doesn't work like that except in fiction. Food deserts are areas where fresh fruits and vegetables in particular are unavailable and the reason is because the people who control their distribution don't see a profit in making them available in particular areas. It shouldn't be surprising that the two areas that we see particularly characterized by these food deserts are areas of low-income people in rural America and in urban America. These people find themselves denied access to fresh fruits and vegetables through what is known as supermarket redlining. Supermarkets don't go into areas where there are communities of low-income people and often people of color.

 Here's an example how the individualizing of obesity and health problems is problematic?

 The first edition of the Atkins diet had a long tirade against the sugar industry. Atkins was saying that we're being poisoned by the sugar industry - they're putting sugar in everything. But then Atkins makes the turn that is very common in America: It's a problem of the industry, it's an economic problem, it's a political problem, and the solution has to be individual. The solution is not to confront the sugar industry, not to legislate, not to use government to change that, but to exercise an almost Puritan control over the will as a way of getting out of a situation that has everything to do with politics.

That's why the diet industry is so very big. If it is  a particular American solution to the problems of obesity. Why is it that 20 percent of fast food meals now are eaten in cars?

Here, we understand that this isn't some preference for the dashboard; it's because Americans work much harder than any other industrialized country to be able to have health care, to have the promise of a pension. In particular if you're from a working family, your income has been dropping in real time since the 1980s. Chances are you live far away from where you work because you can't afford to buy land or buy a house there. So you spend a long time commuting and if you're in a community where people are of a lower income, you'll find less access to fresh fruits and vegetables, less access to green space. Is it any wonder that so many meals are eaten in cars? Is it any wonder that across the industrialized world, we're seeing levels of obesity in communities of poorer people going up so fast?

All of the reasons I've given for why people are forced to eat bad food have nothing to do with choice. Choice is almost entirely absent from any of these calculations. Yes, you can choose between Burger King or McDonald's, but you don't get to choose to have time to have a healthy meal. You don't get to choose to have time to sit down with your family and cook a decent meal, to really enjoy food, savor it, and connect with it. What we're left with is this poor simulacrum of choice - constrained between two options that are equally bad for you. Individualizing this is a case of blaming the victim. When we say that it is your fault because you're choosing McDonalds rather than the Whole Food's salad, that's bollocks because people couldn't choose the Whole Food's salad. The choice is Coke or Pepsi, Burger King or McDonalds, either because people don't have the time or the money.

 The message that is so much harder to explain to Americans is that politics is necessary. People do need to get their hands dirty by getting involved in social change. There is a particularly American fantasy that we can together create a better world by shopping. It's absolutely a case of thinking we can go to Whole Foods, choose the right thing, shop here, pay for this and all of a sudden we will lift the righteous above the impure.

 Until recently, the GM industry was always saying they could feed the world better by using genetically modified crops. Critics responded by saying that, so far, GM crops are really just designed to be resistant to an herbicide, or produce their own pesticides. In other words, this isn't about yield; it's about pesticides.

Golden Rice was going to be the poster child for how genetically modified food was a good thing for the poor. The idea with golden rice was that there are millions of kids who go blind every year because of a preventable deficiency of Vitamin A. What Golden Rice was intended to do was to engineer Vitamin A into rice, which is the staple of some of the world's poorest people. The trouble was that people wouldn't eat it because it was considered inferior. The kinds of rice people prefer in Asia are white rice not brown, not golden. But even if there had been education campaigns, they still would have had to have 50 bowls a day to reach their daily recommended intake.

In the next generation of GM crops, they reduced that number to two bowls a day which is much more manageable but it never addresses the key issue: Why is it that these kids don't have a balanced diet? The reason the golden rice becomes necessary is because the only thing these kids can afford to eat is rice.

The issue for GM crop companies is they are trying very hard to represent themselves as friends to the poor. In the long term, as more and more studies show, these crops are patently bad for the farmers and they certainly won't help feed the world.

  After the revolution I think that there will be a space for international organizations that make loans to democratic governments. I also think that there will be a democratically decided way of exchanging goods between countries that is respectful of and allows countries to sustain themselves, develop, and become better places. But in the meantime, I think the World Trade Organization and the World Bank are actively hampering democracy and they're actively getting in the way of some serious democratic change that needs to happen.

 Protesting against the World Bank and the World Trade Organization is very important as are fighting for workers rights and a living wage. But perhaps the hardest thing to do is, at the very individual level, we need to distrust our palettes because they have been so compromised by corporate food.

The other place I have heard people talk about this is in men's groups who are talking about feminism where they say, "I understand that all my life I have been saturated in patriarchy. Now what do I trust? I can't trust my trust. What do I rely on for guidance, for a new gut feeling?" I think it's the same with food: So much of what we think is food really isn't and we have forgotten how to enjoy food and connect with food.

 This gets into the Slow Food movement.

 It's interesting to me that when the Italian Communist Slow Food movement gets talked about in America, the first bit gets dropped off. But they are communist and they have this very radical question: Why is it that only rich people get to have pleasure? Why is pleasure not the birthright of everyone? The rich and radical moment is when you take this idea that pleasure should be the right of everyone and you go do something about it The slow food movement was responsible for helping to drive up agricultural wages and instrumental in creating a two hour lunch break. They did this, not through individual shopping choices, but through concerted political action and working with people, organizing, being democratic, and then taking on power.

I think this emphasis on joy and reconnecting with our joy can actually be very political. Obviously, it's been derailed in some ways by the bourgeois circle jerk of olive oil and red wine enthusiasts, but it can be very radical. I think that should inform the kind of changes in the way we get our food. Staying out of the supermarket, going to your local farmers market, and getting involved in community food policy councils are all good ideas. The spirit behind it is not that "we must have the finest tomato" but rather, everyone has the right to good food. That democratic impulse is what needs to propel us to a better food future.

 The fastest growing packaged food on the market is organic food. Now Pizza Hut has a new "whole food pizza." Obviously, all of these companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon of whole food and organic food. So it seems like we really need to look at the spirit and the inherent politics of food beyond just the label.

 I think too often our guilt rather than our anger takes over and the guilt points us to look at the right kinds of labels. But I don't think we should feel guilty; we should feel angry. That's definitely the point i'm trying to get across.

"Food and nourishment are right at the point where human rights and the environment intersect."

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...Grace is upon you so eat to live!

Bean Soup with Winter Squash and Greens

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 6 cups reduced-sodium chicken broth
• 3 pounds buttercup squash, peeled and diced (about 6 cups)
• 1 plum tomato, chopped
• 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 2 15-ounce cans pinto or other brown beans, rinsed
• 10 ounces spinach, stemmed and coarsely chopped
• 1 lime, cut into wedges

Directions

Melt butter in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add garlic, carrots and onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are tender and lightly browned, 5 to 7 minutes. Add broth and scrape up any browned bits with a wooden spoon. Add squash, tomato, crushed red pepper, salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook until the squash is very soft and almost breaking apart, about 20 minutes.

Transfer 3 cups of the soup to a blender and puree until smooth. (Use caution when pureeing hot liquids.) Return the pureed soup to the pot. Stir in beans and spinach and cook over medium heat until the beans are heated through and the spinach is wilted, about 5 minutes. Serve with lime wedges.

To make squash bowls: Preheat oven to 425°F. Slice about an inch off the top of each buttercup squash. Scoop out seeds and loose flesh. Pour 1/2 inch water into a glass baking dish (or two) large enough to hold the squash. Place squash cut-side down in the water. Bake until the flesh is tender when gently poked with a knife and the squash still holds its shape, about 30 minutes.

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...Grace is upon you so eat to live!