Health care bill is as murky as product ingredients.

As a person in the US, but more specifically, as a small business owner who currently relies on my husband's health insurance coverage, I am interested in the health care system (well "interested" is probably putting it mildly). To me, the health care debate raging around us today is just another bit of debris in the murky waters our American society is currently swimming in. Think about it: in our sea of information, there is some great stuff, but much of it is either undecipherable or hidden beneath biased, sensational or downright misleading news bytes. I suppose you can think of us as a bunch of fish from different schools, and the most sensational or misleading information sources as sharks. Many of us feed the sharks with our money, viewership and readership. Of course, the sharks stimulate us and get us moving, for better or worse. Many of us would disagree about who is and who isn't a shark.

But why?

The reasons are just as murky. To me it comes down to our lifestyles, our level of engagement, and the quality of available news (not to mention our polarized political parties). In our great country of many choices we're able to build our own futures and to form our own opinions and then voice them and use them to affect policy, but many of us are just too darn busy with all the choices and future-building to conduct in-depth research on important policy matters. So we rely on our representatives, our chosen news sources, maybe we feed the sharks, or maybe we tune out altogether. It's a real challenge for Joe the Plumber (couldn't resist) to spend the extra time to find the GOOD information (I've been researching the healthcare bill and boy would I need a lot more time and expertise than I currently have to get to the bottom of it). Sometimes we consume junk information via pop culture mags and tabloids. I admit I'm a fan, but there is a real opportunity cost here; after all, we have limited time each day to find and consume information. TV news outlets are popular for getting the news quickly but they're iffy in terms of quality. I usually find the regular non-cable nightly news, any network, to be helpful, starting with the local about-town/regional news and followed by the world news. Some cable news also contains "real" news, if you can find it between the political bias and shouting matches (er, roundtables and interviews). Newspapers online are good reading. The Internet has a wealth of information if you can sort through it all, but I guarantee that everything you read will be contradicted somewhere else. The key is to evaluate the source of the information as you read and to cross-check against the most neutral sources you can find.

Personally, I think National Public Radio is a superior news source because that is where I feel that I get the least-biased reporting and best coverage of both the national and global level. Not to say that I haven't seen some bias a time or two in a certain NPR talk show. Just my opinion, folks.

So, is there a right answer? I wish I had it. It seems to my probably naive self that ethics and integrity must rise above (at the news outlets). Perhaps our leaders/representatives could find a better way to communicate the information to us. And we need to spend more time, no matter how tough it is, to get informed, doing a little research and digesting all the different perspectives available in this great country so we can truly form sound opinions. I'm just sayin'.

Inevitably, sometimes we just want to believe what we want to believe, so we bias our own information consumption. This is a tough one -- it can be hard to realize you're doing it and actually thinking about this deeply kind of makes my head hurt.

So after all that, how does this tie into my gift business? Well, our sea of information, murky as it is, includes product labeling, specifically, ingredient labels. And believe me, if you've never read one, it can be a real eye-opener, or a source of complete befuddlement. The amount of government oversight and labeling requirements vary depending on the product and situation, for example, it appears there is more oversight of ingredients and labels for food products than cosmetics. And here we have another navigational challenge. As an above-average (but not rigid) consumer of natural and organic products, and a pretty avid reader of all the information floating around out there, I think twice about the ingredients before I purchase a bodycare or food/beverage gift item for resale in my store. There is a lot of debate about the safety of ingredients in many of the products we've known and loved for all these years. However, like the health care debate, product/ingredient safety is an abyss. The deeper I delve into the research, opinions, and databases, the more questions I have. And it seems that companies also face their own share of challenges developing new products in an evolving industry. Should products be all-natural? Are some synthetic ingredients okay?? For example, one of my vendors states on their website that they've had issues with natural preservatives and have instead chosen chemical preservatives because they feel the chemical preservative's greater effectiveness trumps it's synthetic origin. Other companies seem to do just fine with the natural variety. Many natural products still contain synthetic fragrance, perhaps because it is cheaper than natural essential oil? Is "parfum" bad for us? I sure do spray it on myself every day and have done for years. I'm still reading up on all of this.

Until I have further/better information (ha!) I've adopted a temporary position:
-The products I choose for the store must strike a balance between having natural ingredients and being "giftable" and affordable.
-I believe that "less" and "clear" is the way to go in terms of product ingredients. I love companies that translate the scientific names of ingredients into layman's terms, and I like products that clearly omit the biggest known offenders. The fewer ingredients, the better.

Historically I have tended toward an "everything in moderation" approach to natural products. It's inevitable that we're going to be exposed on a daily basis to toxins (we do breathe the air!), but minimizing toxin exposure certainly can't hurt us, and we can also minimize toxic and persistent waste in our environment. To be honest, from what I can tell, some of the natural ingredients being commonly used haven't been rigorously evaluated for safety/sensitivity, but I still feel better with "lavender essential oil" instead of "synthetic parfum." There are new natural/eco-friendly products hitting the market all the time, and some major companies are getting on board which drives the prices down (yay!) And these days I feel I'm moving more toward being a tee-totaler. Just the other day I was shocked by the ingredients on the back of my ice cream package (a friend's child who has a specific allergy was asking for the ice cream, but after reading the label the child's father refused to serve it, the allergen in question turning out to be the least of his concerns.) It's one of my favorite low-calorie ice cream treats but boy will I think twice about buying it again. Of course, I suppose I could do things the old-fashioned way and make my own natural ice cream at home, but probably not. We're moving forward but it still takes more effort and more money for consumers and companies to switch to natural products.

Today's blog is my segue into a series of highlights of products I think are pretty darn great in the natural/organic arena. And this will most likely lead to some writing on organic gardening and lawncare. So stay tuned!