Discover even more about sustainable eco beauty and wellness on Saturday November 5th at the Do Good. Be Green, conference in Los Angeles.

This inaugural conference from LOVE GOODLY, makers of the leading cruelty-free and eco subscription box, promises to unite style, health, and sustainability. The conference will bring together more than 20 beauty, wellness, fashion, and food brands including:

• Shft
• Zen Yoga Strap
• Rawxies
• DEN Meditation
• Blissoma
• LVX
• PLUS ULTRA
• Hellomellow
• OSEA
• Lippy Girl
• Susi Studio Vegan Shoes
• The Naked Dog
• Page Padgett
• Canopy Verde
• LVX
• Hipsters for Sisters
• Vegan Beauty Review
• Kristinit
• Enrou
• Sapere Aude
• Generosity Water
• Garden of Life

Featured nonprofits at the event will include Farm Sanctuary, Beagle Freedom Project, 5 Gyres, Lipstick Angels, and Non Toxic Revolution.

The event will be headlined by Angela Lindvall, American model, activist, and health coach, and will also welcome panelists like Julie Longyear, the founder of Blissoma — a producer of raw, holistic, natural, vegan skincare products — and Sunny from Vegan Beauty Review, one of the top vegan and cruelty-free beauty blogs out there. Organic Authority’s own co-founder and editor-in-chief, Laura Klein, and our senior editor, Jill Ettinger, are both hosting panels.

Several refresh wellness breaks will led by Kimberly Fowler, founder and owner of YAS Fitness Centers, which combine hatha yoga and spinning for the ultimate, whole-body fitness and wellness routine.

Guests at the conference will have the opportunity to network with curated influencers, bloggers and brands, and detox their lifestyles with hands-on organic skincare and nontoxic beauty makeovers. They’ll also receive a free healthy lunch with delicious drinks, a October/November eco luxury box from LOVE GOODLY, and an eco-goodie tote valued at more than $150.

The conference will be held at The Collection, a stunning historic building in Downtown Los Angeles, just across the street from the brand-new 42,000 square foot Whole Foods Market and not far from Restaurant Row, boasting more than 15 new restaurants and bars on the same street.

Sponsors and partners for the event include GT’s Kombucha, Sapere Aude Sparkling, Whole Foods Downtown, Thrive Market, and the Springs.

Don’t wait to jump on this exciting opportunity! Register for the event before October 20th Register now using our special discount code — LOVEORGANIC — to get tickets for only $24.50 (that’s 75 percent off the $99 ticket!) for $49.50 — 50 percent of the full ticket price. We hope to see you there!

Related on Eco Salon
Green Experts Polled: #1 Favorite Eco Beauty Product
10 Great Boutiques for Eco Beauty
Gwyneth Paltrow Has Something Special for Your Skin [goop by Juice Beauty Review]

The post Get Your Eco Beauty and Wellness Fix at the Do Good. Be Green. Conference appeared first on EcoSalon.

According to new research from the University of Portsmouth Business School, being an extrovert makes it harder to maintain a green lifestyle.

Introverts take a lot of heat from extroverts—and apparently, the planet does too.

Researchers conducted a small-scale study to try and establish if personality type has an impact on how green a person is. They found those with open personalities were the most green, while extroverts were the least.

“It isn’t surprising that people who we describe as open, those who are curious, imaginative, and untraditional, are more likely to be green,” study co-author Sianne Gordon-Wilson said in a statement. “But we were surprised that extroverts are less likely to be green. We had expected that of all the five main personality types, open and extroverted people would be the most green.”

The study surveyed 204 people aged 50 and over using two different theories: The first is called “socio-emotional selective theory,” which essentially describes the way aging people are choosing to spend their time—for example, being more selective with how they spend it and choosing more emotionally meaningful activities. The second is called the “time perspective theory,” which is used to understand how people behave in relation to how much time they assume they have—for example, a 50-year-old is going to have vastly different goals compared to a 70-year-old.

When most people think of an extrovert, they think of a terrifingly loud person who’s all about the spotlight and never stops talking—like, ever (or I could just be projecting). But according to the Myers-Brigg Foundation, extraversion means the person gets energy from being involved in events and oodles of activities; they’re not necessarily the loudest talker, they’re just more comfortable in a group setting.

It’s not that extroverts don’t want to adopt a green lifestyle or aren’t trying to. The reason for the shortfall in their efforts, researchers suspect, is that although they might totally agree with what it means to live an environmentally conscious and green lifestyle, they struggle to put it into practice.

Some everyday examples of a green lifestyle include turning off the lights, buying recycled products, taking your own bags to the supermarket, and not using more water than you need. Extroverts might find they do well with green lifestyle habits that have a quick payoff like the above, but are easily distracted from making bigger changes because of other things competing for their attention. Because they feed off the energy of social situations, they may unintentionally waste energy in other ways.

So while Chatty McNevershutsup goes on and on about her awesome weekend in the lunch room, you may have to be the one who shuts off the lights after she leaves. Keeping the planet healthy is a team sport.

Do you think being an extrovert makes it harder to adopt a green lifestyle?

Related on EcoSalon

5 Ways You Really Suck at Saying Goodbye

8 Ways Introverts Can Avoid Social Awkwardness (Without Being a Recluse)

42 Introvert Problems That Aren’t Problems At All

Party image via Shutterstock

The post Extroverts Least Likely to Adopt a Green Lifestyle Because They’re Too Busy Being Extroverts appeared first on EcoSalon.

Cheese is my weakness. Camembert and cheddar, stilton and swiss, mozzarella and mascarpone, gouda and goat’s cheese, feta and fresh quark – I love them all. And while it may not be great for my waistline or as environmentally pure as organic lentils, at least I can eat it knowing that it’s a more eco-friendly choice than, say, tucking into a juicy slab of steak. Or can I?

My vegetarian friends certainly seem to think so – many of them seem to subsist on cheese. Trust me, I can understand why – it’s an easy source of protein, calcium, vitamin B12 and other nutrients that omnivores typically get from meat. It’s easier than boiling up lentils from scratch and, let’s face it, for most people cheese just plain tastes good.

These same vegetarians might feel confident, or even a little smug, that they are making good dietary and green lifestyle choices. After all, going vegetarian is better for your health, the welfare of animals and the environment. Isn’t it?

Maybe not. Actually, cheese is pretty much just as bad as meat on all counts. Here’s why.

1. Animals die.

You are drinking the milk of the cow rather than eating its flesh, but all the same animals die. Maybe you already know that most cheese is made with animal rennet and you take care to buy vegetarian cheese. Sorry, but you’re not off the hook!

How do you think the mother cow (or sheep or goat) gets milk? She has babies and since after six months her milk production declines, she needs to keep having babies. What do you think happens to the bull calves? They get killed. And since dairy cattle and beef cattle are generally different breeds and there’s little value in raising the male offspring of dairy cows for meat, this happens when they are still babies.

Often, the calves are slaughtered immediately or just left to die, then added to the farm’s compost heap. Otherwise they may be raised for veal, which is usually a cruel process where they are kept in a confinement in semi-darkness and denied proper food, so their flesh stays white.

However, there are varieties of veal that are more humanely raised, allowing the calves to stay with their mothers and eat grass. Surely the ethically consistent position is either to cut out meat and dairy, or to eat the “humane” veal along with your dairy? Oh and by the way, mama cow will likely only live until she is five to seven years old – instead of the 20 years that is her natural lifespan.

2. Animal cruelty.

Most EcoSalon readers will be familiar with concentrated animal feedlot operations or CAFOs. These factory farms are not just prevalent in the rearing of meat animals but in the dairy industry, as well. The book The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason cites a Cornell University Study predicting the number of dairy farms in the United States to decline from 105,000 in 2000 to 16,000 in 2020, while the number of cows per farm and the total milk production both increase.

Many cows are confined to a single stall where they are fed and milked for a single year and if they do get to move outside, it’s usually on a dirt lot rather than on pasture.

The modern dairy cow produces three times more milk than its counterpart from 50 years ago, as a result of breeding, and many cows in the United States are injected with bovine somatotrophin (BST), a genetically engineered growth hormone banned in Canada and the European Union. This boosts milk production by 10% but the site of the injection can become swollen and tender and the injections can increase problems with mastitis, a painful udder infection that affects one in six dairy cows in the US.

The natural lifespan of a cow is 20 years but most dairy cows are killed between five and seven years because they cannot withstand the unnaturally high rate of milk production. By “killed”, I don’t mean euthanised – the process of dealing with “downed” animals involves dragging and winching them by the hoof with a tractor and taking them to a truck to deliver it to the slaughterhouse.

3.  Cheese has a huge environmental impact.

Slate had a great article on the environmental impact of cheese, just before Christmas. The truth is that rearing dairy cows or goats is a carbon-intensive process – and for some reason, sheep are even worse. They need to be fed and most dairy cattle are not exclusively grass fed, so that requires grain to be grown and shipped in. If they are kept in CAFOs, there is a huge manure problem that can pollute local waterways. (If the untreated waste doesn’t go directly into streams and rivers, it’s sprayed onto fields through an irrigation system, but often in quantities too great for the soil to absorb, and then in heavy rain it runs off into the creeks).

According to a local environmental group in Michigan, Lake Erie’s new “dead zone” is linked to runoff from livestock waste. Finally, there’s a problem that sounds like a joke but really isn’t – dairy animals are ruminants that fart and burp a lot of greenhouse gases, specifically methane. Scientists are working on reducing this problem by improving the diets of cattle, but it’s a long haul. All this is just to get the milk – to get cheese, it requires further processing and storage at just the right temperature.

4. Cheese isn’t healthy.

I know many people who go vegetarian – or simply cut out red meat – for health reasons. Yet they eat cheese. This makes no sense to me. In what universe is cheese a health food? I want to move there!

I’ve looked up the nutritional statistics on Fitday.com and generic cheese is 27% fat. A whopping 62% of that is saturated fat, while only 22% is protein. Admittedly you do get a decent serving of calcium with your fat, but there are 84 calories and a heart-stopping 20mg of cholesterol in just one slice.

By contrast, a typical cut of beef compares favourably with 26% protein and 20% fat, of which just 39% is saturated fat. You don’t get so much calcium, but that’s more than compensated for by the fact that 20% of your meal is iron, something many women lack. There is also less cholesterol in beef than cheese.

So pound for pound, beef is healthier than most cheese. Unless of course, you are eating low fat cottage cheese, in which case it’s only 1% fat and 12% protein. But then you could be eating healthier meats as well – lean cuts of beef or lamb, low-fat poultry and fish with healthy oils.

All this is not to make anyone feel guilty. But I do think there is little point in going vegetarian and then making up the shortfall with cheese. Sure, you can eat organic dairy in moderation from small family farms with good environmental and animal welfare practices – such as Straus Family Creamery in Northern California – but you can do the same thing for meat. I know plenty of ethically minded omnivores who eat meat and dairy in moderation and source both with equal care.

I believe if you are going to cut out meat, you need to fully embrace cooking with and eating beans and lentils. There are some great recipes – I am a meat-reducing omnivore myself but one of my favourite all-time recipes is vegan – a Lebanese eggplant moussaka with chickpeas that comes to me via Nigella Lawson.

Free-range and organic eggs are another good source of protein in moderation as well, though caged eggs still account for 98% of US egg production. (In Europe it’s a different story – sales of free-range eggs were due to hit two billion eggs a year in 2009 in the UK, exceeding battery egg sales in value terms, while from next year eggs from battery hens will no longer be sold in German supermarkets). You may want to check out Vanessa’s post on how much protein the human body actually needs.

Images: Joi, fklv, smoodysarah, orinzebest, TheBusyBrain

The post Think Cheese Is More Eco + Humane Than Meat? Think Again appeared first on EcoSalon.

Google’s annual most-searched-terms report, In The News page. Keeping It Green rankings were based on search terms within the subcategory of “green energy,” the report notes with an asterisk.

No offense, solar and renewable energy, but there’s more to the green movement than y’all! That’s why we ferreted out other green keywords and concepts we could find charting throughout the U.S. Zeitgeist 2009 report.

Sticking to the news page, under the category of In the Economy, “cash for clunkers” charted at number two of 10 terms, behind the all encompassing “crisis,” while “green” charted at the eighth most searched, economy-related term in Google News. In last year’s regional searches in 2009 public transit searches ranked in the top 10, including BART schedules at nine for San Francisco, the MTA Trip Planner and Hopstop.com at three and six for New York City, the Madison, Wisconsin Metro schedule at six for that region, and in Chicago, at two and four, the CTA bus planner and RTA Trip Planner.

Finally, on a page of household-related searches, food and drink category, the Acai Berry topped the list.

Zeitgeist reports don’t reflect the same categories year over year, exactly. And as search and business guru John Batelle griped in his own blog on Tuesday, results didn’t reflect December 2009 searches on Google.

But, let’s hope they’ll make Green a permanent Zeitgeist feature, and help sway the “collective consciousness” to the environmentally responsible side.

Basic Reading:

A slideshow at the Huffington Post reflects the Zeitgeist 2009 results.

EcoMeme, a column featuring eco news, tech and business highlights by Lora Kolodny.

The post EcoMeme: Green & Googled in 2009 appeared first on EcoSalon.