These days, it’s hard to find food that doesn’t have at least one ingredient that you can’t pronounce — and recent studies are proving that modern chemicals are more than just a threat to our diction. Common hazardous chemicals like Bisphenol A (BPA) have now been linked to . These little pollutants live in anything from pesticides to plastic water bottles, which makes it seem like no one is safe from ingesting them. The scary parts? It only takes minuscule amounts of these toxins to do serious damage to you — and diseases like type-2 diabetes, formerly referred to as “adult onset”, are now appearing in children. What the link between these two seemingly separate things is this: BPA has, in these studies, been shown to flood the flow of receptors and shutting them off, thereby blocking the flow of insulin… and it doesn’t take much of the chemical to cause this disruption.

The bottom line is this. Watching what you eat is important in general, and especially when you want to lose weight, but being cognizant of what you ingest outside of food cannot be ignored. Pouring chemicals into your body — through food, through cans and plastic bottles which you use to store food items, and through diet drinks and “low-cal” beverages and foods — will certainly not do you any good.  I mean, really — if your grandmother doesn’t recognize something as edible, then it’s not a good choice. And if doing something as simple as drinking out of BPA-free, reusable water bottles and storing foods in glass jars is all it takes to slash your chances at obesity and type-2 diabetes, you’d be crazy not to start now.

Check out sites like Etsy, Green Cheeks, American Apparel, and Skinstinct to buy yours. (PS: Many of these sites also have green-friendly male undershirts and briefs available on the cheap. Need I say more?)

Soot and methane are huge factors of pollution, and their reduction can offer more quick reduction of global warming. Methane comes from landfills, farms (and especially from mass amounts of animals in factory farms), drilling for natural gas, and coal mining. Soot, a byproduct of burning things, is a big problem with rudimentary cook stoves and in some diesel fuels worldwide. Soot also is a big health problem, so dramatically cutting it with existing technology would save between 700,000 and 4.7 million lives each year, according to lead scientists conducting the research. Since soot causes rainfall patterns to shift, reducing it would cut down on droughts in southern Europe and parts of Africa and ease monsoon problems in Asia.

Many methods – including capturing methane from landfills and coal mines, cleaning up cook stoves and diesel engines, and changing agriculture techniques for rice paddies and manure collection – are being used efficiently in many places, but reports from NASA indicate that these practices aren’t being universally adopted. This is where I rely on you guys to help me spread the word about this issue.

PS: shifting the pollution focus doesn’t mean that we’d be ignoring the CO2 issue; we need to start implementing ways to fix this growing problem as soon as possible. Splitting our attention in order to reduce methane and soot isn’t the be-all, end-all when it comes to solving climate change, air pollution, and issues like  hunger, but cutting down these pollutants can help to solve all three. And any attempts are better than none, especially with our planet at stake.

- Larger mass per person means that airlines burn more fuel to fly  you places. And I’m not just talking a little — it’ll mean burning 350 million additional gallons of gasoline (that’s 3.8 millions tons of carbon dioxide) per year, just due to all of the extra fat, according to UK publication The Guardian.

- USA Today reports that due to the higher food and fuel demands of these overweight people, 1 billion extra metric tons of carbon emissions from all overweight and obese people in the world are produced per year. Not over the course of a lifetime — over the course of a YEAR.

I, for one, was repulsed before, but this new information disgusts me. I hope that this makes you gag when you even think about going to the drive-thru again (or at least this month, if you’re so dependent on the darn things).

With two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese, according to the NIH, I wish that I could tell you that these numbers will be declining in the coming years… but as long as people keep shoving their faces with fast food and neglecting the food pyramid, this number will rise in the coming years (experts, as quoted from ABC news reports, say that by 2015, three-fourths of Americans will instead fit this description). Oh, and this trend doesn’t just apply to the US; citizens of many other countries worldwide are experiencing similar, um, gains. Looks like most of you need to drop the Ben and Jerry’s and pick up some Horton (aka, P90X). If you’re offended, I’m not sorry; in fact, you’re the one offending me for not showing Mother Nature better etiquette if you don’t even try.

1) Replace at least one grocery item with a local or organic one.

2) Install a programmable thermostat to regulate how much heat/AC you pump into your rooms. Fun fact: reducing your heat – or turning up your AC temperature – by just two degrees will not only save you money in as little as a month, but for CO2 reduction of emissions, you’ll be doing the equivalent of taking dozens of cars off of the road.

3) Go vegetarian for just one meal a week — doing so will save 35 pounds of meat a year, which translates to 84,000 gallons of water, 245 pounds of grain, and 15.5 gallons of gasoline saved. Giving up your grizzly chicken wings will be beyond worth it.

4) Replace single-use batteries (especially those in your camera) with rechargable ones. You’ll save other batteries from being tossed in landfills, causing toxic pollution.

5) Make the switch to CFLs or LEDs (from incandescents). Seriously — do it already. You save too much money and energy in the long run to not.

6) Clean out your garage of toxic waste like paint cans and motor oil containers. No chick will dig a toxic man cave, which is likely where your lair has been forced to reside.

7) Download Earth911′s free iRecycle app for iPhone or Android — it tells you about collection points for specific materials (like toxic waste, aka batteries, and for electronic equipment), among other perks.

Start at least one DIY reuse project. turn an old pair of jeans into a cute tote, make a quilt out of your old high school shirts. You’re on your own when it comes to making a DIY out of your empty beer bottles or old Madden video games.

9) Start composting. Get a compost bin, and turn your garden into earth’s natural form of recycling (which means gratis fertilizer for you green-thumbs).

10) Hypermile — aka, use better driving practices to maximize your car’s MPG — or use public transportation. Or, you could be daring and actually walk/bike places. Talk about a shocker. In case you don’t know how to, or in case your car doesn’t have a feature to tell you how to hypermile yourself, learn how to hypermile here.

2012 doesn’t judge, but it does love it when you make more than one resolution, so have at it. Make me proud, guys.

Now, you might be asking why this matters to those outside (or, hey, even inside) California. For those of you who are skeptics of global warming, I don’t care if you keep covering your ears every time those words come up — you can’t refute the fact that many states like California are losing their amounts of snow this winter due to warmer weather. You can ignore climate change, but you can’t ignore your kids when they complain that your packaging-peanuts rendition of snowfall isn’t as realistic when you have to resort to it because ski resorts’ snow is thinning.