Balanced Living

September 2005

Food Rules

September is National Food Safety Education Month

The three C’s of food safety can assist in identifying food concerns. By Keeping it Clean, Cooking it Properly, and Keeping it Cold, you enhance the wholesomeness of food.

If any of these areas is compromised, safety may be compromised as well. When in doubt, throw it out—or return it for replacement or refund.

The best time to practice food safety is when you’re shopping at the supermarket.

Watch expiration dates, particularly on perishable goods.

Watch for proper color, texture and overall appearance.

Buy foods at the correct temperature. Uncooked perishables should be cold, frozen food should be firmly frozen, ready-to-eat hot foods should be hot.

Don’t buy food items in damaged containers. Packaging protects foods from bacteria and other contamination.

Inform store management about any product irregularity in order to improve food quality and to protect the safety of other consumers.

After grocery shopping, check foods for signs of spoilage or tampering. If you question something, return it immediately to the store for refund or exchange. Be sure you contact the manager on duty.

When dining out, look over the food you’ve ordered as soon as you’re served:

Notify your server immediately of any food that looks or smells wrong.

Ask for an entirely new plate of food to avoid cross-contamination regardless of why the food was sent back.

If you believe something you ate made you ill, call your clinic, doctor or hospital immediately. Preserve and keep leftovers of the meal you suspect.

Share these instructions with family members. This will help ensure their safety too.

Now test your food safety smarts:

True or False:

1. Perishable foods should not be left at room temperature longer than 2 hours.
2. It’s important to wash counters, cutting boards, and utensils after handling raw foods.
3. It’s safe to reheat leftovers to 145 degrees F, since the food was already cooked once.
4. The safest place to thaw frozen foods is on the kitchen counter.
5. To prevent cross-contamination, it’s important to wash hands after handling raw meat.
6. Bacteria doesn’t grow at room temperature.

Answers

1. True. Refrigerate or freeze perishables, prepared foods, and leftovers within two hours to keep harmful bacteria from growing and multiplying.
2. True. Bacteria can spread throughout the kitchen and get onto cutting boards, utensils, sponges and countertops. Cleanliness is a key to food safety.
3. False. To kill harmful bacteria that cause foodborne illness, all leftovers should be heated to at least 165 degrees F, and sauces, soups and gravies should be brought to a boil when reheating.
4. False. Never defrost food at room temperature. Thaw food in the refrigerator, under cold running water, or in the microwave. Marinate foods in the refrigerator.
5. True. Always wash your hands, cutting boards, dishes, and utensils with hot, soapy water after they come in contact with raw meat, poultry, seafood and eggs.
6. False. Bacteria grows rapidly in the temperature danger zone. Room temperature is in this danger zone.

For more information:
http://www.nraef.org/nfsem/default.asp

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It Takes a Village

September Is Baby Safety Month

Keeping your baby safe isn’t difficult, but it does require vigilance. The following tips outline baby-safety basics:

Motor vehicle

• Strap your baby into a child safety seat in the car’s back seat. The seat should face backward until the baby weighs 20 pounds. Be sure it’s properly secured with the vehicle’s seat belt.
• Never put a child safety seat in the front seat of a car that has airbags.
• 2- and 3-year-olds should sit in a child safety seat in the back seat.

Strollers

• Be sure the stroller’s locking mechanism is locked before putting the baby in the stroller.
• Always use safety straps or seat belts.

Bedroom

• Put your baby to sleep on his or her back in a crib with a flat, firm mattress with no soft bedding underneath. Doing so reduces the risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
• Make sure the baby’s crib is sturdy and has no loose or missing hardware. This will help keep the baby from suffocating or strangling by becoming trapped between broken crib parts.
• Don’t place the crib or changing table near window blinds or curtain cords. This will keep the baby from getting strangled on a cord’s loop.
• Keep the baby away from windows. Install window guards if the baby’s room is above the first floor.
• Be sure the crib and changing table aren’t painted with lead paint. Use a lead-paint tester kit (available at hardware stores) on furniture if you’re not sure.

Bathroom

• Keep medicines, vitamins and soap where the baby can’t reach them. Buy medicines with child safety caps.
• Never leave your baby alone in a bathtub.
• Always check the bath-water temperature with your hand before putting your baby into the tub. This will help prevent burns and scalds.

Kitchen

• Don’t leave your baby alone in a highchair. Always use the safety straps.
• Use your stove’s back burners and keep pot handles turned to the back of the stove.
• Don’t use tablecloths that children can reach. They might pull down hot foods or liquids on themselves.
• Keep cleaning products, knives, matches and plastic bags out of reach. If you store them under the sink, put a child safety latch on the cabinet.

Living areas

• Keep sharp objects off the floor and out of your baby’s reach.
• Put safety plugs in wall sockets.
• Don’t let electric cords dangle where the baby can reach them.
• Use safety gates to block off stairs, so the baby can’t crawl on them.
• Don’t let the baby play with small toys that could be swallowed.
• Don’t leave the baby alone.
• Lock doors that go outside, to stairs or to garages.
• If you have a fireplace or plugged-in space heater, make sure the baby can’t get to either one.

For more information:
www.jpma.org
https://fhahelps.personaladvantage.com/sc/7

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Reach Out

National Suicide Prevention Week is September 18 – 24, 2005

Suicide is a devastating act that almost always seems to friends and family members to come out of the blue. But people often give clues that they’re thinking of suicide. Recognizing the warning signs of suicide could result in a life being saved.

Warning Signs

Giving away cherished possessions, making a will and being preoccupied with death are red flags for impending suicide. Furthermore, the old saying that people who talk about suicide don’t do it is simply not true. Often such talk is a cry for help before it’s too late.

Another warning sign of suicide is depression. Any of these changes could indicate depression:

• feelings of hopelessness, helplessness
• changes in eating, sleeping patterns or behavior
• poor performance at work or school
• poor concentration

Risk Factors

Anyone who is depressed or has been depressed is at risk for suicide. The following are also risk factors:

• alcohol and drug use
• a history of physical or sexual abuse
• troubled teenage years
• death of a friend or family member
• end of a relationship
• a previous suicide attempt

What to Do

If you suspect someone is considering suicide, take warning signs seriously. Don’t assume it will blow over. Share your concerns with someone who is in a position to take charge.

Getting a person past a suicide crisis involves being very direct. Ask these questions:

1. Do you feel there is no other way?
2. Do you have a plan to commit suicide?
3. If yes, how and when would you do it?

If the answers indicate the person is serious about suicide, don’t try to talk him or her out of it. But do try to make a deal with the person: that they won’t do anything without talking to you or another trusted person first. Then get help. Talk to a responsible family member, counselor, EAP professional or suicide prevention hotline immediately. If possible, have a trusted friend or relative stay with the person until the crisis is passed. Follow up with professional help. As a friend or family member, show understanding, compassion and caring, even though you may be angry with the person for putting you through this.

If You’re Considering Suicide…

Reach out: Talk to a family member, friend or doctor. They will be able to get you the help you need and deserve. Or call your local suicide hotline. You can find it in the community service pages of your telephone directory. It’s hard to see it when you’re feeling down, but getting help can help you understand that your life is valuable to yourself and others.

For more information:
www.suicidology.org
https://fhahelps.personaladvantage.com/sc/11

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It’s Never Too Late to Start Saving

Setting Up Your Financial Goals

Money has little to do with some of our most important personal goals. These include spending more time with family, doing volunteer work, or developing a hobby. Yet, other personal goals clearly can be defined as financial goals. These include:

• Paying off your debts. By establishing a repayment plan, you can repay your debts in a systematic fashion. A repayment plan may take years. It requires discipline to control your spending. For example, to pay off $5,000 in credit card debt at 14% interest requires monthly payments of $240 for the next two years. That’s assuming you make no additional charges. As long as you owe, you sacrifice other financial goals for the sake of paying creditors.
• Saving for a down payment on a home. You may be thinking about buying your first home in a few years. The normal size of a down payment is 20% of the home purchase price. At today’s home prices, this means saving somewhere in the range of $25,000 to $50,000. To save $25,000, you would have to set aside just over $4,000 a year for each of the next five years, if you can earn an 8% rate of return.
• Saving for a child’s college education. For the school year that began in August 2003, the average yearly tuition bill at public four-year colleges or universities rose 14.1% to $4,694, the College Board said in its latest survey. For private institutions, tuition prices rose 6.0% to $19,710 a year. By setting aside $260 every three months for the next 15 years, invested at 8%, you will have saved $30,000. This should make a considerable dent in the future cost of your child’s college education. This assumes you use a college savings plan or other tax-advantaged account.
• Saving for retirement. For most of us, saving for retirement is our most important financial goal. We may live 20 or 30 years after we stop working. Financial planners strongly advise against depending entirely on the income you receive from Social Security. To maintain a comfortable living, you may decide you want to save $500,000 in another 30 years.
• Fortunately, you can invest with a tax-deferred account such as an IRA or 401(k) plan. In addition to postponing any taxes until the future, these accounts offer compounded growth. For example, if you invest $5,000 a year for 30 years at 8% in an IRA, the account will grow to almost $567,000. If you were to save with a taxable account and were in the 25% tax bracket, however, the amount would only reach about $395,000. This is the power of compounding you receive by using a tax-advantaged account.

Finally, keep in mind that it’s quite common to have more than one financial goal. It’s important to identify all of them, and set up a savings plan for each goal.

For more information:
http://www.fpanet.org/
https://fhahelps.personaladvantage.com/financial/150/211/241

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Case Closed

Tips for Keeping Your Legal Bills Down

Many of us will experience situations throughout life that require legal assistance. From a traffic ticket to a child custody case, you may need to employ legal help. Here are tips to help you keep those legal bills down:

A law firm partner is going to bill at higher rates for time spent on your case. At the same time, though, having a partner work on your matter may actually be cheaper in the long run if it requires a high level of expertise, as it may take the partner less time to resolve a legal problem than it would an associate who has a lot less experience.

Lawyers typically bill for telephone calls. So make sure you have a good reason for calling your lawyer before you do so. It is sometimes a good idea to try talking to the lawyer’s secretary or even a paralegal to see if you can resolve the issue at hand rather than talking directly to the lawyer.

Lawyers bill for travel time and costs. So if you’re given the choice, plan meetings at your lawyer’s office rather than insisting that he or she come to your office.

Your lawyer should provide you with an itemized bill that gives detailed information on how you are being charged. While every law firm does things differently, many of them charge not only for lawyer time but also for time spent by paralegals, legal secretaries and other support staff. You can use the information on an itemized bill to decide how to communicate most effectively with your lawyer’s law firm without running up the legal bills.

The more time a lawyer has to spend on preparing a case, the more you are going to be charged. You may want to work on developing an effective working relationship with support personnel, with the goal of using your own time to help them work up the case and keep legal bills at a minimum. (This does not mean trying to do all the work yourself and then simply having the lawyer sign off on it.) You have to defer to the discretion of your lawyer, because it’s sometimes easier for a lawyer to develop his or her own work product from scratch rather than trying to revise something that the client has already tried to do on his or her own.

For more information:
http://www.abalawinfo.org/
https://fhahelps.personaladvantage.com/findalawyer