Seen on TV, Now Seen at Home

Everyone recognizes the blue screen with yellow lettering on TV. Every time you see those infomercials, about a thousand things go through your head simultaneously.

“Whoever thought of that is a genius!”

“Do they really make a living out of these things?”

“Who would buy that?”

“I want on

e, but does it really work?”

“That guy is so annoying.”

That is just some of what is going through your head. We, smart consumers, are always skeptical about the products. “It’s too good to be true.” It usually is, but I have a handful of products with the red “As Seen on TV” label and they work pretty well. Not all infomercial products are scams.

Billy Mays, pitchman for OxiClean, said “[I] never endorse a product [I] didn't believe in. “

I never call the 800 number listed on TV. I’ve read testimonies online complaining about the operators hustling additional services and offers until the advertised $19.99 became $69.99. I buy my products either at a brick-and-mortar As Seen on TV store or Walgreens. Then, I’d have my product in hand for the advertised price, even though I don’t have the extra set they promised “if you call within the next 10 minutes.”

A friend got me a version of the Snuggie Fleece Blanket for Christmas. I should’ve gotten a patent for this. I’m always reading on the couch and I’m always cold. It’s such a hassle to turn the page and then adjust the blanket again and again every 2 minutes. Before I got this, I usually have a fleece blanket and safety pin two corners around my neck so I’m actually wearing the blanket and have another one covering my legs.

I bought the Iron Gym at Bed, Bath & Beyond so I can keep up with my upper body conditioning. I used to do gymnastics and play tennis on a regular basis, where I get all my upper body strength. I’ve used it a few times but is now just sitting on my closet door frame. I’m afraid I’m going to break my door frame.

Space Bags was also a gift and this is my second favorite infomercial product. I found these puffy jackets that I want to donate, but I have to wait until the Christmas season to donate them to the coat drives. They are taking up so much space so I stuffed them all in an extra-large space bag and vacuumed out the air. Voila! They’re so flat; I slipped it between some boxes under my bed. I don’t like using suitcases and I don’t have enough duffle bags to put all my clothes in. I hope my clothes won’t be too wrinkled when I take them out of the Space Bag.

My recent purchase is Smooth Away I bought at Walgreens. Honestly, I’m too lazy to shave. Even during skirt season in Stockton. I probably shave only 3 times a year and only during the months of July and August. Sometimes I try to get away not shaving by lathering my legs with lotion. I’m too cheap to buy replacement blades and shaving cream. I’m too lazy to take the time to shave so I try to do it in the shower, but even then I’m still too lazy. With Smooth Away, I just take out the pad and “gently buff the area in circular motions with slight pressure” while I watch TV. Again, I’m too lazy to shave so I haven’t used it yet.

Purifying my Shower Water

I just bought a really expensive Brita filter for my shower. Well, a Jonathan Product Shower purification system, and it wasn’t really that expensive since I bought it from the Bath & Body Works semi-annual sale for 75% off. But basically, it’s just a filter for your shower water.

This purchase is part of my obsession for improving my well-being. Just like Brita, it eliminates metals and chlorine and other harsh chemicals from your water. Jonathan goes one step further to replace the heavy metals with healthy potassium ions to balance pH and pre-condition the water with neutralizing oxidants. Supposedly, showering and washing your hair with pure water will soften hair and skin, and helps preserve hair color. I will have to try it before I can testify that claim.

Upon speculation, it might work. Typically, we shower in hot water, thus opening the pores on our skin and our hair cuticles. They become more vulnerable to its surrounding environment and moisture loss will also occur.

When you go to salons to color your hair, they usually apply hair softeners to open up the cuticles for more effective penetration of the coloring. Chlorine is a bleaching agent, so following logic, removing chlorine helps preserve hair color. Metals and other harsh chemicals can get trapped in the hair shaft preventing the cuticles from closing properly, thus moisture will be lost causing hair to be dull. On a side note, there is a test to determine if your cuticles are healthy or not.

I don’t know what this whole business of “pre-conditioning the water with neutralizing oxidants” and adding “healthy potassium ions to balance pH” is about. According to a homemade experiment done by some homebrewers, the pH of tap water and Brita filtered water is ~8.0 and ~5.5, respectively. Human skin has a pH value between 4.5 and 6. The results of this experiment are pretty interesting. You can see the full results here.

Depending on where you live, water quality varies. Water in polluted areas may contain Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are gases or vapors emitted by various solids or liquids. Inhaling these gases may have adverse health effects.

I still can’t determine if this was a good buy or if I just got suckered into their marketing scheme.

I Like Natural Handmade Soap Just Because

For the past year, I’ve been slowly exchanging my chemical-filled body creams and shampoos for more natural products. Many people who know me would probably think my obsession started with Lush, a handmade cosmetics company, coming to San Francisco. To straighten things out, it actually started when I was taking my Physical Chemistry course.

Awhile before I took the course, I somehow began to be concerned with parabens in my body creams. One of our assignments in class was to write a term paper on a topic related to physical chemistry and I chose to write about absorption of parabens into our skin and paraben run-offs from our showering products.

Parabens are a group of chemicals widely used as preservatives in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. Common parabens include methylparaben, ethylparaben and butylparaben. If you look at the list of ingredients of your shampoo/conditioner, lotion, shaving cream, toothpaste, etc, you’ll see at least one of the paraben’s family members embedded in the list. Parabens, in the most part, are considered safe. A small percentage of the general population may be allergic to paraben, which causes irritation or contact dermatitis. What really concern me are the new studies that say parabens are endocrine disruptors and have estrogenic activities. One scientific study reports that parabens were found in samples of breast tumors. Speculation linking paraben to tumor growth is based on the fact that the molecular structure resembles that of estrogen.

The estrogenic activity of parabens increase with the length of the alkyl group, denoted from their prefixes. Animal experiments have shown that the estrogenic activity of parabens is much weaker than estradiol. In an in vivo study, the effect of butylparaben was determined to be approximately 100,000 times weaker than estradiol, although this effect was only observed when employing a dose level which was 25,000 times higher than is actually used to preserve products. There is still not enough research to show that parabens to pose a health risk.

Parabens aren’t the only synthetics I’m trying to avoid. There is also dimethicone (usually in hair products), said to leave build-up in your hair, and new to the list, sodium lauryl sulfates.

Getting back to the point, I’ve been sucked too deep into the ‘natural’ realm that I’ve lost sight of why I’m really changing my lifestyle. In the beginning, I was doing it for my well-being and for the environment. Now I don’t buy any product without looking at the ingredients beforehand. I’ve become so mind-boggled by all the debates about the naturalness and effectiveness and the cost benefit analysis of the products that I feel like I’m not doing anything for the environment or for myself.

Not Ready for the ‘Gattaca” Yet

A while back, the Fertility Institute—with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Mexico--began to offer prospective parents the option to predetermine their baby’s gender, hair color, eye color, and other physical traits through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Because of great public outrage, the clinic decided to shut the program down on Mar. 2.

Dr. Jeff Steinberg, director of Fertility Institute said, referring to designer babies, “I think it’s very important that we not bury our head in the sand and pretend these advances are not happening.”

Beginning in the 1990s, we were able to test embryos for certain diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Down’s syndrome through a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).

In 1997, PGD was able to predetermine the baby’s sex with 97% accuracy. According to Time magazine, the first couple to utilize this technique was looking to escape from the deadly disease known as X-linked hydrocephalus, or water in the brains, which almost always affect boys. Using PGD, another couple gave birth to a long-wished-for daughter.

To select gender, PGD utilizes the fact that the father provides the Y chromosome that is used to produce a boy, whereas, the mother can only provide the X chromosome. By staining the Y chromosome with a light-sensitive dye, sperms can be sorted out.

In Oct. 2007, Dr. William Kearns, a medical geneticist of the Shady Grove Center for Preimplantation Genetics in Rockville, MD, said that he had enough data to identify genes that relate to northern European skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in 80% of the samples.

"I'm not going to do designer babies," says Dr. Kearns. "I won't sell my soul for a dollar."

The main concern with designing your baby is how that would affect the gene pool, or genetic diversity, and the child’s identity and development.

Putting the issue into perspective, PGD is a good thing in terms of widening the genetic diversity. Unlike genetically modified corns, which are essentially clones, the human species will not be wiped out when disaster occurs.

The human being has 22 pairs of autosomal, non-sex chromosomes, and each chromosome contains hundreds of genes. If you do the math, there are a near infinite number of gene combinations.

As for the “test-tube baby”, he/she may suffer from identity crisis during their childhood. We are known to characterize a person’s race by their physical features, such as hair color, eye color, skin color, and complexion. A blonde hair, blue-eyed baby born through IVF with genetic pre-screening may categorize him/herself as Asian but may be treated as a Caucasian because of his/her features.

Each generation descending from the “test-tube baby” will inherit the same identity crisis. On the bright side, as PGD becomes more widely used, the issue of race is disbanded because of the lack of ability to characterize race from facial features.

Dr. Arthur Caplan, Ph.D, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, is concerned about the child’s development. “This can lead to false expectations on children,” Dr. Caplan explains. “The parents may pick a child to be smart, and he or she doesn’t succeed, then they become upset because they invested money and didn’t get what they want.”

In the long term, being able to mix and match genes is a great discovery. It would save the human species from being wiped out and the world from racial conflicts.

The greatest problem that lies in the capability of mixing and matching traits is that the technology is expanding too fast for the general population to grasp. The transition from IVF in the 1980s to being able to pre-screen for diseases and being able to choose the sex of the baby, to choosing physical traits took only 20 years.

Just like other technology that are available like the computer and cell phones, there is no turning back. However, I did write this with paper and pen before I typed it onto Microsoft Words.

'Apocalypse' of the Banana

This is a banana. Really. It’s the original, wild-type banana.

As you’ve noticed, unlike the original, the bananas we eat are nearly seedless. The black specks you see are the remnants of the seeds; however, they are not viable. To propagate bananas involve removing and transplanting part of the underground stem called a corm. Usually this is done by carefully removing a sucker (a vertical shoot that develops from the base of the banana pseudostem) with some roots intact. When using vegetative parts such as suckers for propagation, there is a risk of transmitting diseases especially the devastating Panama disease. Another method of propagation would be to use tissue culture. This method is preferred since it ensures disease-free planting material. Either way, it is still a form of cloning.

Rumor has it that the banana is becoming extinct. Extinction wouldn’t exactly be the word to describe the banana’s fate. Like most cultivated crop plants, such as the corn, soybean, and rice, bananas lack genetic diversity. Organisms lacking biodiversity is doomed to succumb to diseases.

It is not the first time this has happened. In the 1950s, the Gros Michel banana was known as the ‘banana.’ Later, it was wiped out by the Panama disease, a fungus which attacks the roots of the banana plant. Gros Michel was replaced by the Vietnamese Cavendish banana, the kind we all eat with our sundaes.

There are at least 300 varieties of bananas grown around the world-- in India, Ecuador, Philippines, Costa Rica, and Colombia, for example. However, not all varieties may be accepted as the same fruit. Each species has its own degree of sweetness and texture. There are even ones that taste like apples.

There are many ways for scientists to deal with this problem. Some are working with the hundreds of other kinds of bananas to find a hybrid replacement. Others are working with the Cavendish and attempting to use biotechnology to manipulate the genetics of the Cavendish in order to produce a more disease resistant fruit. The Cavendish may or may not suffer the same fate as the Gros Michel. In any case, we may lose the Cavendish, but the banana will go on.

So Where Does Our Recycling Really Go?

Throughout the week, you praise yourself for sorting out the recyclables from the garbage. By trash day, you take the black, green, and blue bins out to the curb to be emptied by the trash collectors. You leave it on the curb without a second thought. Why would you? After all, it’s just trash; the garbage will go to the landfill, recyclables are given a second chance, and the compost will feed the little bugs that infest the outdoors.

But do you really know what happens to your trash after the garbage truck picks it up? You may be surprised.

The collectibles that the trucks have picked up is unloaded at the local recycling facility. It is mechanically and manually separated. About 65% of the content in we put into the black bin can be recycled. Depending on the facility’s policy, the sorted contents follow their separate fates.

The garbage may go to the local landfill or it may be incinerated. Aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastic bottles, mixed paper, and sheet metals are shipped far and wide. Aluminum cans may get bought by bottling companies and reappear on grocery shelves in sixty days. Glass bottles are reused in road building industries. Plastic bottles are sent to China to manufacture clothing and toys. Mixed paper is used for packaging and insulation. Sheet metals are turned into scrap metal to make cars, electricity pylons, etc.

There is a law in California that states that each city and county must divert 50% of its waste away from landfills through reusing, reducing, recycling, and composting AB 939). In 2006, California announced that they achieved their goal and even exceeded it by 4%.

At the citywide level, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco decided to set his own goal of 75% waste diversion by 2010. In May 2008, Newsom announced the city waste diversion rate was at 70%.

Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the city’s environmental programs, explains that the main export in the West Coast is scrap paper. It is sent to China to be made into packaging to hold our toys, electronics, and shoes. “San Francisco can charge more for its scrap paper because of its low levels of glass contamination. That is because about 15 percent of the city’s 1,200 garbage trucks have two compartments, one for recyclables. That side has a compactor that can compress mixed loads of paper, cans and bottles without breaking the bottles,” boasts Blumenfeld about the main reason the city keeps up its pressure to recycle.

The Los Angeles recently estimated a 59% diversion rate; San Jose, 62%, the best for a populated city of more that 900,000 people. Stockton reported a 47% diversion in 2000.

Waste awareness is very important. We’ve all heard that carbon dioxide is the major contributor of greenhouse gases. However, methane that gets released from landfills is worse and it cannot be offset by driving a Prius or installing solar panels.

Some waste-management experts found a way to take advantage of the methane gas by capturing it in a vacuum and use it to generate electricity. As of 2005, there are 1,654 active landfills in place in the United States. Environmentalists agree that this is an ingenious idea, but is worried that it is still not enough. Permafrost, or soil at or below the freezing point of water for two or more years, in northern Canada and Siberia has a lot of methane stored. Once it melts due to the rising temperature, the methane store would be released.

Reuse, reduce, and let recycling be your last resort.

Plastic Water Bottles are bad, but so are Reusable Water Bottles

Each year, the United States disposes 30 billion empty bottled-water containers. Two million tons of them end up in landfills. By consuming bottled water, we are increasing our carbon footprint. Plastic water bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a flexible, durable, and light plastic, which uses more than 17 million barrels of oil to make enough PET to meet America's demand for bottled water—enough to fuel more than 1 million cars a year. It is estimated that each water bottle we buy consumes one-quarter of its volume in oil in production and transportation costs.

Bottled water is not as safe one might think. Most bottled water is actually tap water. The most harmful element of all is the toxin that leaches out of the plastic. Studies show that the accumulating phthalates in PET can interfere with our endocrine system at high doses, disrupting the regulation of hormones and leading to imbalances that interfere with reproduction. Have you ever drunk out of your water bottle after it has been in the sun for an hour, and it tastes a bit funny? That’s the taste of contaminants from the plastic that have leached into your water.

An alternative is to buy a reusable water bottle and fill it up with filtered tap water. A filter such as Brita does a good job of removing the chlorine from tap water. However, the problem lies in the reusable water bottle itself. The two reusable containers often seen on the streets are the 32 oz. Nalgene Polycarbonate Loop-Top Bottle ($9) and the Sigg Swiss-Made Aluminum Water Bottle ($19.99).

Sigg Aluminum Water Bottles

Sigg is an aluminum water bottle, available in 144 chic designs to fit every personality.

It is lined with brass and epoxy, which is questionable. Sigg would not release the contents of epoxy, saying it is a proprietary secret. However, it is FDA approved and independently tested to be taste and scent inert – and resistant to any leaching. Some suspect that leaching of BPA occurs, but in trace amounts.

Unlike Nalgene bottles, it is not as durable. The thin aluminum is susceptible to dents and dings, but it doesn’t affect the inside. It is inadvisable to place the Sigg into the freezer; no matter how full it is, as it will cause the bottle to crack.

Nalgene Water Bottles

The current Nalgene bottles are made of polyethylene. Their older version, made of polycarbonate, was pulled off the shelf because of strong concerns of BPA leaching into the water. Storing anything that is meant to be digested in plastic containers is never a good idea, especially if you are going to heat up the plastic.

In another sense, Nalgene bottles are eco-friendly. They are highly durable, lightweight, reusable, and recyclable. It also reduces the use of energy to produce and transport the disposable plastic water bottles, and waste in landfills.