Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [78]
The following groups offer resources and information that question the safety of vaccines: The National Vaccine Information Center (www.nvic.org), Dr. Joseph Mercola (www.mercola.com), and Gary Null (www.garynull.com). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov) offers information on the other side of the issue and encourages parents to vaccinate based on their documentation.
Keeping a Truly Vegan Home
Your home should be a safe, comfortable place, filled with good energy and products that make you happy. Filling your home environment with vegan products is another step toward fully realizing this lifestyle. Every new purchase for your home can add to the solid foundation of your dedication to vegan living.
Spotting and replacing hidden nonvegan home items
Take a look around your home and begin to notice what materials are used to create the items you own. You often can find vegan alternatives for everything from candles to comforters. Activities you may enjoy at home, like gardening or playing music, may have relied on animal byproducts in the past, but not anymore. Staying vegan goes hand in hand with nontoxic living as well, and you can start making stronger connections between cruelty-free purchases and eco-friendly living.
Busy bees: That’s a lot of work!
The process through which bees create their wax is extraordinary. Young worker bees use special wax-producing glands in their abdomens. They eat enormous amounts of honey, and the glands transform the sugar into wax, which the bees then excrete through these glands. The bees chew up the bits of wax from their abdomens and plaster the wax to the walls of the hive to construct the honeycomb. This amazing structure is built to maintain the hive’s temperature at around 95 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just right for bees to be happy and go about their business.
Honeybees fly vast distances every day to gather nectar from flowers. They collect nectar from 100 to 1,500 flowers before their second “honey stomach” is full enough to return to the hive. The honeybees then pass on the gathered nectar to worker bees in the hive. The worker bees chew the nectar with special enzymes and distribute it among the little holes in the honeycomb. The hive’s internal air circulation evaporates the excess water, turning the nectar into honey. A colony of bees requires between 120 and 200 pounds of honey a year to survive, and this amount of honey production requires an incredible amount of work.
Be gentle with yourself. No one is perfect, and you’re already doing more than most people by even thinking about these things.
Leaving honey and beeswax for the bees
The vast majority of vegans don’t consider beeswax candles — or any product derived from beeswax or honey — to be vegan. A beehive is created with countless hours of effort by the bees in each colony (see the nearby sidebar, “Busy bees: That’s a lot of work!”). Flying vast distances to gather the necessary ingredients for honey and wax, bees defend their hives and the queen with their very lives if they perceive attack.
Any product that’s taken from another species isn’t vegan. Some bees may be hurt or killed inadvertently by beekeepers, and bees aren’t programmed to gather honey for human uses — they use it to raise their young.
Luckily, countless products are available that are natural and nontoxic alternatives to beeswax and honey products. You can easily substitute for honey in cooking by using agave, maple syrup, or brown rice syrup. Soy candles are an excellent alternative to beeswax and are preferable to standard paraffin candles, which are a petroleum product. The more natural soy candles also refrain from using toxic metals in the