my sister… being eaten by diet coke! aaaaah!

My sister drinks LOADS of diet coke. What is there loads of in diet coke? Aspartame.

Consuming a lot of aspartame may inhibit the ability of enzymes in your brain to function normally, according to a new review by scientists from the University of Pretoria and the University of Limpopo.

The review found that high doses of the sweetener may lead to neurodegeneration. It has also previously been found that aspartame consumption can cause neurological and behavioral disturbances in sensitive individuals.

This one time my sister called us up and asked if it would be alright for her to do her own electrical work.

Another time she told me that picking a salad dressing wasn’t “rocket scientists”.

About a month before that she called us to inform us that she had no idea how to hang her clothes on the rack in her closet.

Maybe I should also point out that her favorite singers are Britney Spears and Hilary Duff.

I think it’s time to cut back on the diet coke, sis.

But in all seriousness you’d think that a product with such a controversy surrounding it wouldn’t remain so widely used. Since my last coke uprising I haven’t really drank that much - but I haven’t cut it out of my liquid diet either. Gordo had good points in saying

1) Anytime you find yourself drinking soda, remind yourself that you would have been better off drinking water. It’s hard to see why anyone would deprive themselves of calcium, just to prove some kind of point about cancer.

2) Coca-cola has an appalling human rights and labor record.

3) Coke causes worms to form in pork. See this video, and see the experiment repeated.

Despite what Alon wants to put into his body and tell me isn’t bad for you - it is. And coke DOES have a horrible human rights record… and aspartame isn’t GOOD for you.

I hate that living modestly is starting to be equated with disregarding the comforts that we’ve been given… instead of a noble and earth saving way of life.

I have a group of friends who all live together. In a maximum 6 person house (4 “real” bedrooms) there are 13 people. They have no television, only a couple of them have a computer, when I go over there are rarely lights on and they in no way went out of their way to buy new furniture or anything for the house. On top of these smaller things they also bike around – no one owns a car – cook together with vegan, organic, dumpster dived food and they run the house on grey water.

Just a quick summary for those who don’t know – dumpster diving is when you take food out of a dumpster to eat it. A lot of people get a little grossed out by this thought however having worked in a grocery store I assure you there is more than plenty of completely fresh and fine food being thrown out. Before knowing people who dumpstered I often thought “why would those dumpsters be locked???” but now I know that for whatever reason some grocery stores don’t want people stealing their garbage.

Grey water is essentially just reusing water. Most houses that are being built in Guelph are already implementing grey water systems directly into the house by connecting washing machine water to toilets. Said friends put the plug in during a shower and use shower water to flush toilets. And to be honest – the toilets don’t get flushed that often anyway.

For me, this would be an almost impossible way of living. I hate being cold, they never have the heater one. I live on my computer, they don’t have internet. I drink a liter of milk a day, they never drink milk. I will never will with a roommate ever again in my entire life unless I’m getting married, they live with 12 other people. It takes a lot of dedication and passion for the environmental movement to live this kind of lifestyle.

When I told my brother and a friend of mine about this they had the same reaction “that’s disgusting”. … I said that you would just have to get used it, but then they corrected me. Neither meant that it was physically disgusting, but that it was disgusting to see people choosing to live like “the poor”. They felt as though this was a mockery to people who couldn’t afford food, who couldn’t afford to live with just one family in a house and who couldn’t afford to keep their hydro on. Instead you have a household of by no means rich, but by no mean poor… group of kids who are choosing to not work and live like that. They choose to eat “garbage”, to be cold and to stay in the dark.

I brushed it off at the time, but it is now one thing that has been running through my head day in and day out. The only reason grocery stores throw out “almost” expired food is because if they lower the price people won’t buy the higher priced food - so they just keep it until it doesn’t make sense to sell it at the same price point and then toss out the perfectly good food.

Granted, dumpstering started out as a way to beat economic struggling but soon became a haven for “freeganism” (those who want to escape the consumerist life and culture) so it is backpacking off something poor people WERE doing. But with grey water… 50 - 80% of all residential water waste is from grey water.

Is what they are doing inherently wrong because they’re not taking advantage of all that is available to them? Or is it noble because they are not adhering to an overly comfortable lifestyle knowing what damage it does to the world.

I personally take the latter – I think that if you’re going to live in guilt or if you know that what you’re doing is wrong for the world and wrong socially then you just flat out shouldn’t do it. Sure, my friends aren’t taking advantage of a lot of “comforts” that are available to them, but they can also say that they are contributing less to huge problems. Continuing to simply “enjoy” and frivolously go about life without considering the impact that this “comfortable” life is doing is far more of a disgusting way to live than to try and do something about it.

If everyone here in Canada (or anywhere, really…) lived like that we’d have way less water waste, more food to distribute to the actual poor, we would create less of a carbon footprint in general and we’d be more in touch with the “real world” as opposed to being consumed in television and internet.

I can understand that people who have grown up in Canada or “western” life styles wouldn’t be comfortable living like my friends. However, unless you’re able to say that you are helping or lowering your over all impact on the world as much as they are – you should just shut your mouth. Living like that is a choice, it is not a mockery of people who can’t afford more “comfort” it is a choice to do the right thing for the world.

I’ve always thought that the only thing that could improve a Snickers bar is a healthy portion of tongue and tripe

Candies made by Mars are no longer considered suitable for a vegetarian diet, thanks to the addition of rennet, a substance derived from the stomach lining of cows. The candies will still be considered kosher.

For now, it seems that only Mars products in the United Kingdom will be affected, with the exception of Bubba’s Chocolate Covered Pork Pieces, a popular American confection that has always contained meat.

(cross posted at appletree)

Watch the video:

…Besides the obvious sexual stereotyping, the normalization of being “tough” (tough enough to throw a car over a bridge) and the women being seen as weak… this is just unhealthy crappy food.

The men refuse to eat healthy foods because that’s just for chicks. In one of the ads in this set there is even an appearance of a Hummer that displays manly behavior and validates one of the men as being a real man.

This promotes unhealthy eating habits and stupid gender stereotypes. The last thing that men need nailed into their brains is that eating a greasy 1000 calorie hunk of disgusting meat validates them as a man. The excuse of those who made the ads as quoted in Consumer Reports was “We feel comfortable that consumers will not make diet choices based on seeing a 30 second humorous commercial” … Well, I hate to tell you this, but that’s what ads are for.

Whether this is meant to be funny or over looked you have to consider the facts. 30% of Americans are clinically obese while 38% of them have some form of cardiovascular disease. A whopping 71% of American men are over weight. Considering statistics like that, it might not be such a horrible idea to put the Burger King away and chow down on some carrot sticks. Forget what “other men” might think of you and consider your health and your body.

A bottle is just a bottle? Not when it’s being filled with tap water and sold… then it’s a bottle that is leaking chemicals into your water, selling for a ridiculous price and not being recycled. I was reading this month’s MacLean’s magazine and there is a big article in it about bottled water. The magazine sports quotes such as:

“Toting a natural resource that costs more than gasoline in a mottle destined to clog a landfill doesn’t exactly telegraph eco-cred”

“There’s mounting evidence that these containers are leaching toxins into the bererages we’re drinking and our children are drinking”

“There’s empirical evidence that these plastic ingredients are now in the bodies of every citizen … I am quite sure that a few years from now we will look back at these toxins and shake our heads and wonder ‘What the heck were we thinking?’ ”

“An estimated 88% of water bottles are not recycled. According to the Environment and Plastics Industry Council, Canadians sent 65 000 tonnes of PET beverage containers, many of them water bottles, to landfills or incineration in 2002.”

W.T.F.

Nearly 1 out of every 5 people in Canada drink bottled water exclusively. …another 3 out of every 5 drinking it once in a while. The United Church is calling for a ban on bottled water, not often do I side with a church.. .but I find myself siding with the United Church of Canada more often than not.

“If you’ve got $100 to spend on groceries each week, we don’t want people buying into some subliminal message that the water in their taps isn’t safe and that . . . they have to be spending $10 to $15 on a couple of cases of bottled water. In fact, they’re paying for their water twice. They’re buying that bottled water and they’re also paying taxes for water — crazy, if you’re on a limited income.”

Besides that I found out from my mom today that Nestle simply bottles the exact same water that the entire City of Guelph gets out of their taps, years ago Coke-A-Cola admitted that Dasani was simply tap water, as well. So why do people do it? The answer is simple - it’s a life style choice.

Bottled water such as Bling H20 is simply cool to carry around. Girls like to walk around university with bottled water so that people know she is exacerbating herself to the point where she must drink water all day. On the Bling H20 website they state that you can tell “a lot” about a person from the type of water they carry… Which is very true. People who carry Bling H20 are idiots, people who carry Nalgene’s full of tap water are hippies, and Madonna carries only blessed water. It’s a weird weird world. Last year the United States alone spent $11 billion drinking 8.3 gallons of bottled water. The average American consumed 28 gallons of their favorite brand comprising of up to $100 billion dollars for the global market of bottled water.

The price of the water is incredible. The new limited edition of Cobalt Bling costs over $500 for a case of 12. This really shows the power of marketing. You place a jeweled bottle on a girls photoshopped ass and you can charge $500 for water. A single serving of bottled water costs 1 - 2 dollars, depending on where you get it, the same amount of water from the tap costs a fraction of this. The Natural resources Defense Council in the US has estimated that, depending on the brand, bottled water costs 240 to 10 000 times the price of tap water… and this is for water that Coke and Pepsi just take out of their taps. Canone and Nestle just take it right out of the ground water. These companies are also not required by law to disclose the geographical location or source of their water.

Many people will say that bottled water is superior to tap water because it’s cleaner - but more and more peer reviewed journals are finding that there are disturbing amounts of toxic ingredients in water such as arsenic and mercury in bottled water. Again picking on Dasani, Coke had to retract nearly 1/2 a million bottles due to a bromate contamination. The NRCD ran a study with the following findings:

NRDC’s study included testing of more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of bottled water. While most of the tested waters were found to be of high quality, some brands were contaminated: about one-third of the waters tested contained levels of contamination — including synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic — in at least one sample that exceeded allowable limits under either state or bottled water industry standards or guidelines.

Bottled water is just so pointless. If it’s going to continue to be used, it should at least be different than what comes out of our taps. There should be stricter regulations and information readily available for what has gone into it, what tests have been made and why, exactly, it is so much better than what is coming out of our taps. And just as there is in BC - EVERYWHERE there should be deposit charges made on bottles! Then when you return them or recycle them you get some money back for the bottle. I think in BC it’s only $0.05 but it should be like $1.00 to give people more incentive to do it.

Don’t drink bottled water. …Really don’t drink Bling h20, if you do… you’re an idiot.