Articles (Ecologist)

If you really want younger-looking and healthier skin, you may do better to think more carefully about what you put inside your body than what you put on it. By Pat Thomas Moisturisers have one basic function: to maintain the water balance in the most superficial layers of the skin. This layer of the skin, […]

The human species has been breastfeeding for nearly half a million years. It’s only in the last 60 years that we have begun to give babies the highly processed convenience food called ‘formula’. The health consequences – twice the risk of dying in the first six weeks of life, five times the risk of gastroenteritis, […]

If you’re one of the millions of people using fake tan to look attractive and healthy, be wary: they are full of chemicals that can cause damage to your skin. By Pat Thomas. Fear is a great motivator – especially in cosmetics. The more you can make people afraid of something, the more stuff you […]

You don’t have to choose between looking good and being healthy. In our regular look at cosmetic ingredients, Pat Thomas gives you the information you need to identify safer cosmetic and bodycare products. Preservatives, by their very nature, are designed to kill things. Specifically they work by killing cells and preventing them from multiplying and […]

Over 1,000 juvenile delinquents showed a 44 per cent drop in antisocial behaviour when put on a low sugar diet. So why is the government completely ignoring what we are feeding our children, and yet is happy to spend £2,500 on administering each ASBO? In October 2003 the UK government launched the latest offensive in […]

If you ‘deskfast’ with sugary, fat-filled cereal bars instead of eating a good breakfast you could be doing untold damage to your body and mind. By Pat Thomas. Most of us have grown up with the mantra that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Yet 56 per cent of us skips breakfast. […]

Why choose between looking good and being healthy? Pat Thomas examines the ingredients in personal care products, and asks why manufacturers don’t use safer alternatives. Mission If you regularly use modern cosmetics and bodycare products, then you are regularly exposing yourself to harmful chemicals. On average we each use nine different products, with a total […]

When Tyrone B Hayes, an expert in amphibian biology and a popular professor at the University of California at Berkley, was asked by Syngenta to look into one of the world’s most commonly used herbicide, Atrazine, he was excited. Until he discovered what it was doing to his beloved frogs and us. Pat Thomas meets […]

Thinking of brightening up your house for spring? Think again, there’s a lot more to paint than meets the eye. Pat Thomas reports A fresh coat of paint is a quick, cost-effective way to give even the scruffiest space a new lease on life. Yet we seldom stop to consider the ingredients that make up […]

The good, bad, and ugly sides of chocolate addiction. Eat a bar of chocolate and chances are you will soon be awash with some kind of guilt. If you are health conscious you will be fretting about calories, fat, pimples and pesticides. If you are socially and ecologically aware there will be the added concern […]