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It’s the little things we do everyday that can add up to real change.

Using less, using smart and rethinking old habits can make a difference in your life and for the planet.

Environmentally friendly tips won’t just help the planet but can help you live a healthier life, as well.

Limiting your exposure to toxins, additives, factory farmed meats and dairy can whittle your waistline, improve your health and keep you in your budget.

Tip Number 1

Reuse it. Bring a reusable bag on your next shopping trip, and you’ve already helped out the planet. The U.S. alone uses about 100 billion new plastic bags each year, and (brace yourself) this massive production costs 12 million barrels of oil. Worldwide, only about 1% of plastic bags are recycled — which means that the rest end up in landfills, oceans or elsewhere in the environment. Why does it matter? Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, but light exposure can degrade them enough to release toxic polymer particles — most of which end up in the ocean. Approximately 1 million birds and 100,000 turtles and other sea animals die of starvation each year after ingesting after ingesting discarded plastics and other trash debris, which block their digestive tracts. And public agencies spend millions of dollars on litter clean-up each year. (In case you’re wondering, paper bags aren’t much better. Each year, 14 million trees are cut down to make paper shopping bags via a process that requires even more energy than the making of plastic bags.)

Read on for more.

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Women are at much higher risk for contracting lung cancer and for women who have never smoked the rate of developing lung cancer is on the rise.

The American Association for Cancer Research has found that lung cancer tumors in non-smokers are different than tumors in smokers and they are trying to determine why.

The World Health Organization, WHO, recently classified diesel fumes as carcinogenic.

This might explain the rise along with other environmental factors.

“Not only has there been an increase in the number of women and non-smokers contracting the disease, but there has also been an increase in the number of cases diagnosed in stage 4 of the illness,” lead researcher Dr. Chrystèle Locher said in a statement.
This change — 58 percent with stage 4 in 2010 compared with 43 percent in 2000 — might reflect new classifications of different stages of the disease, the researchers said. They also found big changes in the type of cancer being diagnosed. The rate of people developing adenocarcinoma, a form of non-small cell lung cancer, jumped from 35.8 percent to 53.5 percent over the decade.