Irate with Nalgene... Something I Never Thought I'd Say

For over 5 years now, I have been bringing bottles of water to work and drinking from them throughout the day. Specifically, I bring Nalgene bottles and fill them up with water from my fridge. I use these Nalgene bottles because they are incredibly sturdy, easy to clean, save me tons of money compared to buying bottled water, and help save the environment because I'm not consuming wasteful, plastic bottles everyday. They've been great for me. But now I'm absolutely petrified of them.

Today I read in Consumer Reports a descriptive article pertaining to the potential dangers of B.P.A.-- a type of plastic that is used to make these Nalgene bottles. I can't find this particular article online yet, but the Consumerist ran a helpful piece, as did this blog post which really rings true with me, and this Treehugger.com article echoes this growing concern of mine... and hopefully yours as well.

This society we live in where we perpetually produce new products, and THEN LATER find out they are harmful has got to stop. It's positively scary what we're doing to our Earth and ourselves, and reading an article about a product that was previously considered to be innocuous really disturbs me. Especially when I used one every freaking day of the work week.

The average lay person like myself would never know the difference between a "good" plastic and a "bad" plastic, and now I feel completely used and ignorant because I would never have had any idea about the problem with BPAs had I not read this article. Nalgene has really made me irate.

Sadly, nowhere on their site does Nalgene even attempt to address this issue, which is poor public relations to me. Nor do they make any attempt at offering refunds or exchanges for people who bought these types of bottles. Not only that, there's no humanoid listed that I could even write to, just a department name or a generic email address, both of which will probably wind up in their respective trash bins. But I'll still give them a piece of my mind, and hey, I just griped with the world about my concerns right, so that's a start.

My next thing to do is find a new SAFE water bottle...

Weighing the Odds on Cancer

Well another strike against obesity has been recorded, with scientists announcing that there's "convincing" evidence connecting a person's being overweight and subsequently developing cancer. Not good news for many folks.

Allow me, if you will, to toss one possible reason for this link into the mix:

The more fat, i.e. the more body cells you have, the higher chance you have of some of those cells becoming abnormal or cancerous.

Right? It's a game of chance really. The odds increase that you'll develop cancerous cells if there's more cells that could potentially be affected.

Add in the fact that overweight people tend to eat poorly to begin with, regularly devouring meats cooked in harmful smoke, or foods made with lots of questionable chemicals in them certainly doesn't help.

Dare I say that being heavy tips the scales against your favor?