Your health
Safer produce
Don't let concerns over pesticide exposure keep you from enjoying summer's bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Harvard Health Publications suggests these steps to limit your family's pesticide intake:
Buy locally. Produce grown on small, nearby farms is less likely to be treated with pesticide waxes used to prevent fungus growth during shipping - one more reason to shop your local farmers market.
Wash and peel. Wash produce with a mix of water and mild dishwashing liquid, peel if possible and remove outer leaves of vegetables like lettuce and cabbage. Peeling alone eliminates all pesticide residues for bananas, carrots and potatoes; so does shucking corn.
You've got mail:
Planning to start a family? Www.parenting.com will send a weekly fertility newsletter right to your inbox. The chronological guide covers such topics as "the best baby-making sex," fertility "superfoods" and how relationships between partners change as you're trying to conceive. Later topics include choosing the right doctor, pregnancy weight gain and prenatal yoga.
To sign up, visit www.parenting.com/ enewssignup.jsp and choose the "Trying to Conceive Newsletter."
You can also check out the site's fertility and ovulation calculator to help you figure out the best days to try to get pregnant - and the baby's due date.
Still time to quit
Women who quit smoking have a 21 percent lower risk of death from coronary heart disease within five years of smoking their last cigarette, according to new research. The study, published in May in the Journal of the American Medical Association and reported in U.S. News & World Report, suggests that the harms of smoking are reversible and may even decline to the level of nonsmokers.
And here's one more reason to stop smoking: A recent study shows that toddlers are most affected by secondhand smoke in the home. Children ages 2 to 5 absorb six times more nicotine than 9- to 14-year-olds from the same level of parental smoking, researchers found - partly because the little ones spend more time in the house. As a result, the youngest children showed a dramatic increase in inflammation markers and damage to the lining of their blood vessels.