The US Environmental Protection Agency shares the following message for reducing waste through reuse and recycling during the holiday season.

• After the holidays, look for ways to recycle your tree instead of sending it to a landfill. Check with your community solid waste department and find out if they collect and mulch trees. Your town might be able to use chippings from mulched trees for hiking trails or beachfront erosion barriers.
• Buy a potted tree and plant it after the holidays.
• Have a create your own decorations party! Invite family and friends to create holiday decorations such as ornaments made from old greeting cards or cookie dough, garlands made from strung popcorn or cranberries, wreaths made from artificial greens and flowers, and potpourri made from kitchen spices such as cinnamon and cloves.
• Turn off or unplug holiday lights during the day. Doing so will not only save energy, but will also help your lights last longer.
• If you’re buying new greeting cards this holiday season, send recycled-content greeting cards. Buying recycled encourages manufacturers to make more recycled-content products available. Also consider sending electronic cards, and remember to recycle any paper cards you receive.
• Think “green” while shopping holiday and birthday sales. Try to buy items with minimal packaging and/or made with recycled content. Check product labels to determine an item’s recyclability and whether it is made from recycled materials.

• This holiday, Consider the durability of a product before you buy it as a gift. Cheaper, less durable items often wear out quickly, creating waste and costing you money. Look for items that embody the concept of reuse. For example: wooden toys made from scrap wood, craft kits that take advantage of used goods and discards, and drawing boards that can be erased and reused.

• Thousands of paper and plastic shopping bags end up in landfills every year. Reduce the number of bags thrown out by bringing reusable cloth bags for holiday gift shopping. Tell store clerks you don’t need a bag for small or oversized purchases. Use reusable cloth bags instead of disposable ones for trick-or-treating.
• Wrap gifts in recycled or reused wrapping paper or funny papers. Also remember to save or recycle used wrapping paper. Give gifts that don’t require much packaging, such as concert tickets or gift certificates.
• Donate the older toys that your children no longer use to charities. Also check with local libraries. A number of public libraries have extended their children’s section to include a lending collection of toys, games, puzzles, and musical instruments.
• Many battery sales occur during the holiday season. Buy rechargeable batteries to accompany your electronic gifts, and consider giving a battery charger as well. Rechargeable batteries reduce the amount of potentially harmful materials thrown away, and can save money in the long run.
• When giving flowers as gifts, consider buying long-lasting silk flowers, potted plants, or live bushes, shrubs, or trees that can be planted in the spring as gifts.
• Bake cookies or other goodies for your friends and love ones and package them in reusable and/or recyclable containers as gifts. Homemade goodies show how much you care and help you avoid packaging waste.
• If you host a party, set the table with cloth napkins and reusable dishes, glasses, and silverware. Consider renting more formal tableware that you might not use very often. Also save and reuse party hats, decorations, and favors.

• After holiday festivities, put leftovers in recyclable containers, and share them with family, friends, or others. Donate whole, untouched leftovers from parties to a local food bank or homeless shelter.

• Where possible, compost leftover food scraps, leaves, and grass clippings.
• After parties, fill your dishwasher to capacity before running it. You will run fewer cycles, which saves energy.
• Wash and reuse empty holiday glass and plastic jars, milk jugs, coffee cans, dairy tubs, and other similar containers that would otherwise get thrown away. These containers can be used to store leftovers as well as buttons, nails, or other loose items.

An enhanced E-book

We  are pleased to announce publishing “Can Santa Find Me on Christmas?”, which is our first enhanced e-book for young readers. It  features animation, narration, and text highlighting to engage and assist emerging readers in developing independent reading skills.

In our enhanced e-book, Santa goes digital, using modern day solutions for the age-old worry of children away from home on Christmas. In “Can Santa Find Me on Christmas?” the “Can Do” Kids learn how Santa will deliver their gifts to them wherever they are.

In the beginning of our enhanced e-book, the reader is offered the choice of reading the book independently or with the enhancements of animation, narration and text highlighting. Animation is used sparingly to prevent distracting a young reader from listening to the story and identifying each word as it is highlighted.

Each of the 22 pages in the enhanced e-book features the “Can Do” characters in full color illustrations.

You can go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NfNHFw2-9I  to view a YouTube trailer of our enhanced e-book, “Can Santa find Me on Christmas?”. It was published on Nov 30, 2016

Our enhanced e-book is the first of new happenings on”Can Do” Street. There is more to come in  2017…stay tuned!

All the best,

Jean

Most supermarkets now carry a line of products labelled “gluten-free.” Many of us are choosing to buy and eat these new cookies, breads and other products we believe to be made without  flour. For most of us, it is a choice to avoid white flour, which we may consider not healthy for us.

For the three million Americans who have Celiac disease, a gluten free diet is there only choice  in managing their autoimmune digestive condition.

The FDA recently issued a new rule that provides standard definition to protect the health of Americans with Celiac disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration published a new regulation defining the term “gluten-free” for voluntary food labeling.

The press release issued by the FDA reads,“Adherence to a gluten-free diet is the key to treating Celiac disease, which can be very disruptive to everyday life,” said FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D. “The FDA’s new ‘gluten-free’ definition will help people with this condition make food choices with confidence and allow them to better manage their health. This new federal definition standardizes the meaning of “gluten-free” claims across the food industry. It requires that, in order to use the term “gluten-free” on its label, a food must meet all of the requirements of the definition, including that the food must contain less than 20 parts per million of gluten. The rule also requires foods with the claims “no gluten,” “free of gluten,” and “without gluten” to meet the definition for “gluten-free.”

The FDA recognizes that many foods currently labeled as “gluten-free” may be able to meet the new federal definition already. Food manufacturers will have a year after the rule is published to bring their labels into compliance with the new requirements.

“We encourage the food industry to come into compliance with the new definition as soon as possible and help us make it as easy as possible for people with Celiac disease to identify foods that meet the federal definition of ‘gluten-free,” said Michael R. Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.

“The term “gluten” refers to proteins that occur naturally in wheat, rye, barley and cross-bred hybrids of these grains.  In people with Celiac disease, foods that contain gluten trigger production of antibodies that attack and damage the lining of the small intestine. Such damage limits the ability of Celiac disease patients to absorb nutrients and puts them at risk of other very serious health problems, including nutritional deficiencies, osteoporosis, growth retardation, infertility, miscarriages, short stature, and intestinal cancers.”

The FDA was directed to issue the new regulation by the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act (FALCPA), which directed FDA to set guidelines for the use of the term “gluten-free” to help people with Celiac disease maintain a gluten-free diet.

The regulation was published in the Federal Register.

For more information:

• FDA: Gluten-Free Labeling
• FDA: Gluten-Free Labeling Final Rule Q&A
• Consumer Update

This Halloween why not encourage your Trick or Treaters to share some of their Halloween bounty with others who could use a treat?

Let’s face it, kids don’t need all the candy they get on Halloween. Sharing their bounty is a great way of practicing kindness and generosity.

Here are a few suggestions as to what to do with the Halloween candy your children are willing to share with others:

• What a treat it would be for residents of a senior assisted living facility to receive a visit from young children in costumes giving out a part of their goodies. What happy memories it would bring back for the seniors! What a lasting memory it would be for the children to witness the happiness they were giving just by sharing a little bit of their time and a few pieces of candy.

• There are children who will not get to go trick or treating. Two groups of children that will not be trick or treating are those that live in homeless shelters with their moms, and those that live with their moms in safe houses for domestic violence victims. You will need to call your local Dept of Social Services to find out where you can drop off Halloween candies for these two groups. Their exact locations, especially domestic violence safe houses, are not given out to the public.

• Another good use for all that extra Halloween candy-send it in a care package to our troops serving overseas.  This could be a great school, church or recreation center group project.  How wonderful for child to get a letter from a soldier, who is overseas, thanking him or her for sharing Halloween. For more information on how to collect and where to send the candy go to:

www.dosomething.org/actnow/actionguide/how-collect-halloween-candy-our-troops#

More women die from heart disease than from any other cause. In fact, one in four women in the United States dies from heart disease, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI).

“The risk of heart disease increases for everyone as they age,” says cardiologist Shari Targum, M.D., a medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “For women, the risk goes up after menopause, but younger women can also develop heart disease.”

FDA offers many resources to help educate women of all ages about the safe use of FDA-approved drugs and devices for the treatment and prevention of heart disease. FDA has fact sheets, videos, and other web-based tools on heart disease and conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure that may increase a woman’s risk for heart disease.

FDA created the “Heart Health for Women” site to connect women to FDA resources to support heart-healthy living. Visit the website at: www.fda.gov/womenshearthealth

“I encourage women of all ages to look to FDA for resources to help them reduce their risk for heart disease and make informed decisions about their health,” says Marsha Henderson, director of the Office of Women’s Health at FDA.

Heart Health for Women

When you think about heart disease, you probably imagine heart attacks and chest pain. But women need to know that heart health is about more than just heart attacks. Women need to take steps to reduce their risk for heart disease:

• Manage conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol that can increase your risk for heart disease.
• Learn to recognize the symptoms of a heart attack in women, including nausea, anxiety, an ache or feeling of tightness in the chest, and pain in the upper body.
• Use the Nutrition Label to make heart-healthy food choices.
• Daily use of aspirin is not right for everyone. Talk with a health care professional before you use aspirin as a way to prevent heart attacks.
• If you smoke, try to quit. See our booklet to learn more about medicines to help you quit.
• Talk to a health professional about whether you can participate in a clinical trial for a heart medication or procedure. Visit the FDA Patient Network to learn more about clinical trials.

Menopause and Heart Health

“Menopause does not cause heart disease,” says Targum. “But the decline in estrogen after menopause may be one of several factors in the increase in heart disease risk.” Other risks, such as weight gain, may also increase around the time of menopause.

Hormone therapy is used to treat some of the problems women have during menopause. “However, the American Heart Association recommends against using post-menopausal estrogen hormone replacement therapy to prevent heart disease,” says Targum.

Make a Plan, Take Action

Work with your health care team to make a plan for your heart health. Whatever your regimen, make sure to keep a list of your medicines and bring it with you to all of your appointments.