The High-Fructose War

The Corn Refiners Association is fighting back against people learning about the ill effects of High-Fructose Corn Syrup with commercials like this one:



The evidence is piling up, with some of it not so well defined yet, as it relies on animal testing. But the tests are there and the results aren't that great. It may lead to diabetes. The Mayo clinic suggests that it may also lead to high cholesterol.  An article in the San Francisco Chronicle mentions that the USDA suggests Americans reduce their intake of foods with added sugar.

Whether it's simply the addition of high fructose corn syrup alone or all the refined and unnatural sugars in the American diets, it is quite clear that a reduction of artificial and refined sugars can improve your diet. I personally have been reducing as much of this as possible, I've moved from fake pancake syrup to the natural kind from New Hampshire, I try to only eat snack foods such as Nature Valley Roasted Nut Crunch bars that only contain corn syrup (and nuts of course.) Making the effort in your life to reduce the "poison" you intake will help you live a healthy and Poison Free life.

Poison Free Blog Reader

So this isn't exactly SxE, but like the Tesla Roadster I wrote about last year, I'm all about electronic devices that (maybe not 100% of the time) help the environment. The Amazon Kindle is a cool new electronic reader, that's wireless and can download blogs (like this very one) and let you read it on the go with no waste of paper. I like the fact that it has a lot of features and is fairly small. I don't know enough about the battery, but would like to know how environment friendly or unfriendly it is.

Anger and Poison Free

A friend of mine had a rather crappy situation on New Year's Eve with a pothead. My friend isn't Straight Edge, but she's very adamant about her distaste of drugs and drug use. This pothead kept trying to get her to smoke, she insisted to him several times to stop. And her boyfriend even told him to stop, but he kept being a jerk. I'm not a violent person, so I'd never condone fighting, although sometimes it'd feel real good to punch an ass like that right in the face.

I've been trying to ease up on my anger with people like that, it's just not healthy. Being poison free to me also means removing the anger you have that can poison your attitude and outlook on life. I think that anger and stress are sometimes the most poisonous things in our life. I know that I get pretty stressed out a lot, and sometimes get very annoyed and angry with things I know that I should ignore. I've decided that I need to just not let things bother me that I can't control, and I need to ignore people that are poisonous.

Some people are just ignorant and poison filled and they only make your life worse if you keep them around or let them in to your life.

Poison Free Roadster

Anyone that knows me, knows I love to drive and drive fast. Which is certainly a shame since when I moved to Brooklyn I had to sell my Subaru WRX. But I still love cars and just found out about a new auto company called Tesla Motors. They will be producing the fastest and longest range 100% electric car. It goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds and has a range of 250 miles on a single 3.5 hour charge. Freaking Beautiful!

Now aside from the power and range the fact that it's 100% electric just makes it that much more desirable and important for the world. No need to feed off oil from despotic and evil rulers (foreign and domestic.) I can't wait for when they come out with a rally model.

[Saturday, July 28, 2006] PS: Since I haven't had a car for a while now I didn't even think about how one that lives in NYC would even be able to own a 100% electric car that needed to be plugged in. Tesla will be offering a solar panel carport as mentioned in the AutoblogGreen interview but that still won't help those that have to park in the street. Now of course I realize that anyone that would own this particular model won't be parking it in the street. Although, it does raise the point of needing to offer a built in system for recharging. Solar panels on the car itself, such as those offered by XsunX (with this kind of name I wonder if the founder is SxE, solar power is very DIY and Poison Free) that are transparent and can be applied to windows as well as possibly the entire surface of the car.

All that would need to be created to meet this lack of outlets on the street and when traveling long distance is some sort of power transfer station (like a gas station) that could give your car a quick jump of juice in a short period of time. That of course is years out, but by the time the average driver will be purchasing a 100% electric 2 door hatchback we might have this kind of technology.