The Futon Shop Green Reel

 The Futon Shop Reel
1) Organic Trade Association suggests asking about certified organic label
2) Nascar goes Green-
3) Green moms inspiration in the classroom
4) San Francisco Birth and Baby Fair- green babies
5) Marines go green

Please come in, go to our website, or call us for a quote

 What's better than relaxing on Sundays with a nice cup of coffee and a book on your favorite window seat. Here at The Futon Shop we can make that dream come true! We custom make fabric slipcovers, and you can add piping for a square look or for contrast to make your room shine! We also custom make mattresses to whatever thickness or size you need. Are you worried about your seat cushions fading from the sun? Worry no longer! Our Outdura fabric is water, stain, and sun proof.

DO YOU HAVE INSOMNIA?

Since I had my baby Alexander 5 months ago, I have found my lack of sleep very troubling. Not only because I am crabby and slightly klutzy( hence my recent broken toe accident), but because my body feels achy. As a new mother, I have read at least ten different items on the best amount of time my baby should sleep. In retrospect, I should be looking at just as many article and books in regard to my own sleep and health wellness. If you are a new mother or just a fellow insomniac. Every Wednesday will be a blog about a health problems. This Wednesday is Sleep and finding ways get more shut eye.

1) TRY ZEO: A NEW APP ON YOUR SMART PHONE THAT REGULATES EVERY STAGE YOU SLEEP!

 

On September 26, 2011, Zeo launched the mobile version of its new Zeo® Sleep Manager™ consumer product line.  Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile allows consumers to track both their sleep quantity and sleep quality in the comfort of their own beds and also helps people manage and improve their sleep using their iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and popular Android-based smartphones.  Zeo Sleep Manager is the only consumer sleep tracking system with scientifically-proven accuracy that measures actual sleep phases, including Light, Deep and REM sleep, providing a complete and accurate picture of users’ sleep.  Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile then sends sleep data directly to users’ smartphones, which then sync automatically to their online Zeo accounts, so they can easily access online analytical tools and customized expert guidance to help them improve their sleep.

2) According to Webmed:

 "A mattress can impact a person's sleep," says Michael Decker, PhD, RN, associate professor at Georgia State University and spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

 Ideally, a mattress that reduces the pressure points on your body should give you a better night's sleep, Decker says. Yet the ideal mattress is different for each person.

Anyone with back or neck pain should take a Goldilocks approach to mattress buying: not too hard, and not too soft.

"If you're on too soft [of] a mattress, you'll start to sink down to the bottom. But on too hard of a mattress you have too much pressure on the sacrum, and on the shoulders, and on the back of the head," says Howard Levy, MD, an Emory University assistant professor of orthopaedics, physical medicine, and rehabilitation.

A medium-firm mattress, or a firm mattress with a softer pillow top, will give your spine that "just-right" balance of support and cushioning.

 If you have allergies or asthma, you might have considered buying a bed labeled "hypoallergenic."

 If you've been having trouble sleeping, the problem might not be your mattress type, but its age. "It's really important for people to realize that mattresses have a certain lifespan,"

3) Survey by Sleep in Australia: shows sleeping solo improves sleep

      Admit it, does he or she keep you up with snoring? Coughing, moving  around? Even though you love your significant other, it may be time to sleep in separate beds 

4) How much sleep do we need?

The amount of sleep each person needs depends on many factors, including age. Infants generally require about 16 hours a day, while teenagers need about 9 hours on average. For most adults, 7 to 8 hours a night appears to be the best amount of sleep, although some people may need as few as 5 hours or as many as 10 hours of sleep each day. Women in the first 3 months of pregnancy often need several more hours of sleep than usual. The amount of sleep a person needs also increases if he or she has been deprived of sleep in previous days. Getting too little sleep creates a "sleep debt," which is much like being overdrawn at a bank. Eventually, your body will demand that the debt be repaid. We don't seem to adapt to getting less sleep than we need; while we may get used to a sleep-depriving schedule, our judgment, reaction time, and other functions are still impaired. 

5) American Sleep Association Tips For A Better Night Sleep 

Tips for a Good Night's Sleep:

Adapted from "When You Can't Sleep: The ABCs of ZZZs," by the National Sleep Foundation.

• Set a schedule:

• Exercise:

Try to exercise 20 to 30 minutes a day. Daily exercise often helps people sleep, although a workout soon before bedtime may interfere with sleep.

• Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol:

• Relax before bed:

• Sleep until sunlight:

If possible, wake up with the sun, or use very bright lights in the morning. Sunlight helps the body's internal biological clock reset itself each day. Sleep experts recommend exposure to an hour of morning sunlight for people having problems falling asleep.

• Don't lie in bed awake:

• Control your room temperature:

Maintain a comfortable temperature in the bedroom. Extreme temperatures may disrupt sleep or prevent you from falling asleep.

• See a doctor if your sleeping problem continues:

Fire Retardants

The Futon Shop believes it is the consumer's right not to sleep on toxic mattresses. Flame retardant is a dangerous toxin in many products: here are a few news articles about where flame retardant has been found:

 1) it is in our food

Flame retardant contamination is found in butter

December 07, 2010|By Shari Roan | Los Angeles Times

• 

Flame retardants were found in a box of butter. (Gary Porter / Milwaukee…)

Flame retardant chemicals that are known to be harmful to health have been found in a package of butter sampled in a Dallas grocery story, according to a study published Tuesday. This is the first reported case of food contamination that is thought to have resulted from the chemicals used in the food packaging.

The chemicals are polybrominated diphenyl ethers -- or PBDEs. The chemicals are commonly found in electronic devices, fabrics and insulation. PBDEs are known to be harmful to animals and are suspected of disrupting human thyroid hormones. U.S. manufacturers have agreed to phase out a particularly harmful type of chemical called deca-BDE.
Ten samples of butter were purchased in Dallas grocery stores as part of a routine investigation intended to help scientists improve estimates for the amounts of PBDEs people consume in food. The contaminated sample of butter contained PBDEs that were 135 times the average amount found in the other nine samples and was particularly high in the dangerous deca-BDE. The butter's paper wrapper had levels more than 16 times greater than in the butter itself.
The authors of the report, from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Dallas, said they don't know how and where the butter was contaminated. But they called for more random screening of food products. "This suggests that screening for toxic chemicals in food can reveal their presence in U.S. food, and illustrates a potential route of exposure."
The study appears online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

2)  California's Fire Retardant laws going to far?

Flame Retardants in Everyday Products May Be a Health Hazard, Scientists Say

By Bryan Walsh | @bryanrwalsh | October 28, 2010 | 4

inShare

David Seed Photography/Getty Images

Here’s a fact to brighten your Thursday: you have a much smaller chance than your grandparents of bursting into flames. That’s because brominated and chlorinated flame retardants (BFR and CFR) — classes of chemicals that inhibit fire ignition — have become common ingredients in everything from clothes to couches to computers. (You can thank safety-conscious California for that; the state’s tough laws on flame retardants led to their wide-scale use by manufacturers around the country.)
But fire safety has come with a cost. The chemicals used to prevent fires have repeatedly been shown to cause damage to human health. First polychlorinated binphenyls (PCBs) were found to be severely toxic to people and the environment, and the chemicals were banned in 1977. Next came polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE), another class of chemicals used as flame retardants; over the years PBDEs have been found to accumulate in organic tissues and in the environment — even in human breast milk — and they are hormones disruptors, with links to thyroid and other health problems. PentaBDE and OctaBDE have been banned by the European Union and withdrawn from production by the only U.S. manufacturer; one other chemical, DecaBDE, is still in wide production but is restricted in the European Union and will be voluntarily withdrawn from the U.S. in 2013. (More on Time.com: Canada Declares BPA Toxic. Is the U.S. Next?).
Other BFRs and CFRs have emerged as substitutes for restricted flame retardants, but it turns out that they, too, may be linked to health problems. That’s the word from 145 scientists in 22 countries who today published the first-ever consensus statement documenting health hazards from flame retardant chemicals. Called the “San Antonio Statement on Brominated and Chlorinated Flame Retardants” — and published in the open academic journal Environmental Health Perspectives (download a PDF here) — the article makes the case that:

Brominated and chlorinated flame retardants as classes of substances are a concern for persistence, bioaccumulation, long-range transport, and toxicity.

What toxicity? CFRs and BFRs contain compounds that are carcinogens, reproductive and neurological toxins and endocrine disruptors. And like their predecessors, once these chemicals come into contact with the human body, they can hang around for a long time, accumulating in greater proportions. (Chemicals that bioaccumulate in tissue can be considered more dangerous than ones that are quickly flushed out of the body.) (More on Time.com: 6 Common Sources of Radiation In Your Life).
Nor are CFRs and BFRs only dangerous in their production and use. Because the chemicals are now common in electronics, they can also pose a risk as e-waste — computers and televisions often end up in the junkyards of developing countries, where they are dismantled and burned by the poor to recycle valuable metals. Unprotected e-waste recycling can result in the spread of brominated and chlorinated dioxins, which can be highly toxic to people and the environment.
In an accompanying editorial in Environmental Health Perspectives (PDF here), Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and Dr. Ake Bergman, an environmental chemist at the University of Stockholm, elaborate on the San Antonio Statement and call for more attention from regulators on flame retardants:

The San Antonio Statement is a call for attention to a continuing pattern of unfortunate substitution. Since the 1970s, BFRs and CFRs have commonly served as substitutes for other BFRs and CFRs, even though there have been early warnings and periodic reminders about the problematic properties of these chemicals. To maintain fire safety, safer alternatives to harmful BFRs and CFRs should be developed. In addition, more attention should be paid to the actual need for flame retardants in products. For example, do nursing pillows and baby strollers need flame retardants? Just as we have known for years that significant exposure to lead occurred via house dust, why has it taken us so long to understand that BFRs and CFRs, which are used in consumer products, also can escape their matrix into house, office, car, and airplane dust, and also will end up in people, the environment, and wildlife? Why do we not learn from the past?

Well, one of the reasons we don’t learn from the past is that industry will fight very hard against tightening regulations of potentially toxic chemicals. The American Chemistry Council — the powerful lobbying group for the chemical industry — argues that studies linking flame retardants to health problems are far from conclusive, and that the benefit the chemicals provide by preventing fire shouldn’t be discounted. (More on Time.com: The Perils of Plastic – Environmental Toxins).
It’s true that the studies linking flame retardants to illnesses — like that of many potential environmental toxins — aren’t yet conclusive, and I think we’ll all agree that avoiding self-immolation is a good thing. But as I wrote for TIME earlier this year, our system for regulating the ever-increasing number of chemicals in our environment is broken, even as there is more and more evidence that what is out there can hurt us — especially at the very beginning of our lives.
As Dr. Sanjay Gupta — of CNN and TIME — told a special meeting of the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health this week:

I’d always assumed government watchdogs had evaluated and signed off on the safety of the chemicals we encounter in our lives… What we don’t know can really hurt us. And there’s a lot we don’t know.

As the San Antonio Statement shows, we are learning. Now it’s time to act on that knowledge — before even more damage is done.

Memorial Day Sale

Save Now! Facebook Exclusive. Memorial Day Sale This Weekend
http://www.facebook.com/TheFutonShop?sk=app_190322544333196

last chance!!!

News Reel

The Futon Shop's Weekly News Reel:

1) Be careful of baby Spinach: it has been recalled..here is a number to call
2) Is there life on Mars? Organic Carbon Found on Mars --From Volcanism Not Biology
3) Local San Francisco Green company giving back to their community
4) New York moms leading the green parenting movement!
5) Ferrari has gone green!! 

5)

American Idol

He just makes me smile!!! The American Idol Finale last night was fun to watch. What did you think of the winner? I thought he was good..but the girl was so much better! 

Memorial Day Sales

Memorial Day The cost of War

Memorial day is coming, do we really know what it means The one thing we can never forget is the cost. of war -- any war -- is high. The price tag is not measured only in dollars. It's measured in the loss of the most valuable asset of all -- the price of war is measured in the loss of human lives.. I send my thoughts to the:
4474 U.S. American service members have died in the war in Iraq.
1959 U.S. American service members have died in the war in Afghanistan
670 from California
30,490 U.S. service members have been wounded due to combat actions in Iraq and 2,309 in Afghanistan (32,799 total). 
Ages 18-21 -- 28.2% (1,325) of the deaths 

Ages 22-24 -- 23.7% (1,108) of the deaths 

Ages 25-30 -- 25.6% (1,198) of the deaths 

Ages 31-35 -- 10.4% (486) of the deaths 

Over 35 -- 12.1% (566) of the deaths

During the Vietnam War (1964 to 1975), there were 47,413 U.S. Military battle-related deaths, and 10,785 service members died from other causes.

In the five years of World War II (1940-1945), 291,557 American troops lost their lives in combat, and 671,846 were wounded.

Join us on Facebook!!! Like us and you get exclusive coupons!

Friday's Green News

1) The Organic Consumer's Association Report: 2) Science Sheds Light on debate over Organic VS. Conventional Agriculture 3)Sustainability is the Mission 4)From Farm to Bedroom 5)Sleep Quotes that send mixed messages

Source: degreesearch.org via Nicole on Pinterest