I remember when I was a little kid growing up, it was a treat to go out to the drive up broasted chicken place on Saturday night. We used to sit there in our car seats, where it smelled vaguely of gasoline and interior vinyl treatment. I can still remember the taste of those chicken and potato wedges. Sometimes with a chocolate shake. Mmmm…

The chicken place was about 30 minutes away. It was the only reason we went there. On the way home, my sister and I would marvel at the petroleum plant with its million tiny sparkling lights shining in the night. Sometimes we would pull sideways at the edges of our eyes to make all of the lights double up and be even more sparkly. It seemed huge to us. And castle like. Magical, we thought. But only at night. During the day it just looked big and dull and kind of dirty with billows of steam rising into the air. I remember asking once about the steam. What was it and was it bad? No, honey, it’s just steam.

It’s just been over the last couple years that I’ve become aware of where petroleum and steam ends up. And, how it can potentially impact health. Who would think that hair shampoo and make-up and perfume, for goodness sake, can have petroleum derived chemicals in them that can act like estrogen in the body?

And… hormones and antibiotics in chicken and meat and milk.

Oh geez…

As a physician, it was really a wake up call for me. As a breast cancer survivor, not once but twice, well…

why didn’t anybody ever tell me!…

so I could do something….

Not to be an organic freak or an eco-vangelist, but to just do things that make more sense healthwise. And be good for the earth too. Europe calls it the precautionary principle.

It’s just that green done right turns out to be healthy too. Organic actually makes sense. Health problems can benefit from going green and organic, or, cleaning up an environmental problem. And, the time is right, because there are lots of new products out there that help us do that.

What we’re going to shoot for here at GoGreen.LiveHealthy. is to be a resource for what we know about the health effects of things in our everyday environment and how you can think about specific everyday health problems through an environmental view point. As well as ideas to go about living your everyday life while keeping these things in mind.

And, since we don’t like the idea of deprivation in order to be healthy or green or organic, we’ll be on the look out for cool items you might want to check out.

Go Green. Live Healthy. With an emphasis on Live!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!