KEEP IT GREEN
The Best Eco-Friendly and Kid-Friendly Activities for Earth Day
PLANT A GARDEN. Gardening is one of the most rewarding ways to spend time outdoors. Your kids can learn about caring for another living thing and grow their own vegetables and fruits! A great way to start is to find out what’s in season in your area. If you don’t have an outdoor garden, you can pick out some indoor plants or create a hanging garden with recycled bottles! BUILD A COMPOST SYSTEM. If you have a garden, the next best thing you can do is start composting at home! Did you know that you can compost your cardboard products? Instead of waiting for the recycling truck every other week, you can use your spare green and brown waste to create incredibly nutritious soil for your garden! Green waste includes vegetable and fruit scraps, eggshells, nutshells, coffee grounds, etc. Brown waste includes cardboard, dead leaves, paper egg cartons, wine corks, and more. Get a bin and maintain a green-to-brown ratio of 1-to-2. Layer, water, and turn the compost to keep it healthy. It can take anywhere from two months to a year, depending on what you put in and how often you turn it.
It can be tough to figure out how to switch up family game nights. Kids can be very attached to their electronics, making it hard to get them invested in anything else. With Earth Day coming up this month, you have the perfect excuse to put down the phones and get outside to save the planet. If you’re looking for ways to spend time with your kids on Earth Day, try these eco-friendly family activities! PICK UP TRASH AND MAKE ART WITH IT. You can teach your kids a lot about downcycling and upcycling through recycled art. Downcycling is when waste is recycled to become a new product, but there’s a loss of quality as a result. Upcycling is the opposite: Whatever you recycle becomes a product with a higher value. One way to upcycle is to create recycled art. Use old newspapers or magazines to create collages or papier-mâché bowl sculptures around balloons, jars, or your own custom shape with chicken wire. You can also use old plastic or glass bottles as beautiful hanging planters or create a memorable wind chime from jar lids, tin cans, plastic silverware, and old rubber bands.
We hope you and your family have fun with these planet- loving activities! Stay clean!
HAVE HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE?
Turn to Your Oral Health
high blood pressure rates, so if you have healthy gums, you’ll respond better to medication. Other recent studies have shown similar findings. For example, scientists in the United Kingdom reviewed 81 different studies that tested a collective total of 250,000 people, and they found that those with moderate to severe gum disease were 22% more likely to have high blood pressure. Five of those studies also asserted that blood pressure dropped when a patient’s gum disease was treated. This might leave you wondering how exactly poor oral health and high blood pressure are so intertwined. Research on this connection is still in the early stages, but for now, the short answer is that no one is quite certain. That being said, a growing body of research seems to support a correlation between the two. So for now, if you want to do everything you can to lower your blood pressure, keeping up on your dental hygiene is a good first step. It’s no secret that good oral health plays an important role in our overall health, so the next time your dentist tells you to floss more, it might be wise to listen.
Hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, is a condition that many Americans suffer from without even realizing it. To spread awareness about hypertension, May has become the designated National Blood Pressure Month. Certain risk factors like stress and poor diet can increase the chances of suffering from hypertension, but did you know that your oral health is also linked to your blood pressure? According to a study published by the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, healthier gums can lead to healthier blood pressure levels.
According to the study, people with gum disease were 20% less likely to respond well to medications targeting
2 • www.caringmoderndentistry.com
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