Monday, June 30, 2008

Eating healthy and being sustainable go hand in hand.

It's well known that eating fresh produce daily it's good for your health. And now it's good for your environment too. According to Carnegie Mellon researchers Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews your diet impact tremendously on your CO2 household footprint. Greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing food impact more than how much the food travels. So the first thing to do is to eat less red meat and/or dairy products1. The alternative is to eat more grains and produce.
When you pick a fruit or a vegetable the vitamin content start to decay in a matter of a few ours. The more time the vegetable/fruit take to arrive from the farm to your table the less vitamin it contains. The most vulnerable vitamin is the vitamin C. The refrigeration may slow down the process, but not stop it.
The more the food is manipulated the less vitamin retains.
The freezing process is the best way to conserve some produces. In fact, the produce is frozen soon after the picking phase. There is a loss of vitamin B with the time and the use of a lot of energy.
Another good way of preserving food and its vitamins content is drying it. If conducted in a natural way, using sun and wind, is one of the oldest and also more carbon neutral way of preserving food.
The canned food has the least content of vitamins because is highly processed.
Now we also know that the CO2 footprint of a produce grow exponentially with the distance it travels and the processing/storing it undergoes.
At the end of the day, if you try to buy as much as you can local and unprocessed/unfrozen food you will take care of your health and of the environment. And you also save money, have less packaging to deal with, support the local economy and have the chance to get to know who works hard to provide food for you.
You can do even more with a little more effort. If you buy organic food and produce in season you cut on oil consumption because you promote food which has less, if none, pesticide (made with oil) and you cut on oil consumption to import food out of season.
If you are very dedicated and love to do some gardening you can be more carbon neutral by growing your own vegetables in a CSA farm (http://www.localharvest.org/csa/, http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/csa/csa.shtml, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture) or in a community garden (http://www.civicgardencenter.org/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_garden) or even better in your back yard.
So keep an eye on the right column on the “Produce of the month” and give a look at the "Healthy food" links.
We are what we eat!
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1Carnegie Mellon University. "Want To Reduce Your Food-related Carbon Footprint? What You Eat Is More Important Than Where It Came From." ScienceDaily 22 April 2008. 1 July 2008 .

Monday, June 16, 2008

Explore the new blog Think Green Act Clean!!

Hi everyone,
I imagine most of you are on vacation now. As I probably told you, this summer I was going to work on the creation of our blog. Here it is.
Remember I'm not a professional and it is like a new baby, so please feel free to give me any advice and feedback in those following months.

Thank you

Vanessa Scocchera