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Home Coffee Roasters: 5 Efficient Choices

Home coffee roasting, once considered an exotic practice only for the hardcore coffee drinker, has seen a rebirth in recent years. Coffee lovers everywhere are embracing this surprisingly simple and efficient way to enjoy the best tasting coffee around. Once a common practice in American households, the 20th century onslaught of commercial coffee roasters and instant coffee virtually wiped out …

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Nutrients: Essential Elements of Healthy Teeth

Lettuce growing in a greenhouse with grow lights above

Brush. Floss. See your dentist. We all know the basics of keeping our mouths healthy, but if you’re hitting the high points and still having trouble staying out of the dental chair, there could be a missing link in your overall dental health plan: nutrition. We all know that eating our fruits and veggies and cutting down on the sugar …

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Choosing Sustainable Seafood

Our food choices are a big part of our overall environmental impact, and seafood can seem like an environmental catch-22.  Its popularity has been on the rise as part of a healthy diet, but some types of seafood are surprisingly un-green.  So what makes a particular type of seafood environmentally friendly?  Read on to learn more about the issues, so …

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Efficient Source of Herbs: Mountain Rose

When it comes to living well and feeling your best, few things have a larger impact than taking care of your body. But finding the purest, most organic and efficient nutrition for your body — to take care of it inside and out — can sometimes be a challenge. Fortunately, there’s Mountain Rose Herbs, a company that is certified organic …

Adaptogens: Plants That Help Your Body Deal With Stress

Work. Kids. Marriage. Financial Problems. There are one hundred little things in any given day that can really stress us out — and all that worrying is bad for our health. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that up to 90% of doctor visits in the United States are stress related. Autoimmune diseases, obesity, depression, sleep …

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The Most Efficient Snack: Pure Organic Bar

A MetaEfficient snack bar. Unlike other nutrient bars I’ve tasted, this one’s delicious. My topic pick is the Orange Cranberry Bar. It’s made by a company called PURE, based in Holland, Michigan. 

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World’s First 100% Solar-Powered Stadium

A couple of years ago, we wrote about a 1.3 megawatt solar-powered stadium in Switzerland. A new solar powered stadium has been built in Taiwan for the 2009 World Games in July. Designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the stadium incorporates 8,844 solar panels on the roof. The roof will generate enough energy to power the building’s 3,300 lights and …

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HippoRoller Water Carrier – Simple Efficiency With A Far-Reaching Payoff

Water is an immediate, fundamental need for human survival, but one in six people worldwide don’t have immediate access to water resources, particularly in arid regions of southern Africa. The HippoRoller is a deceptively efficient water carrier with the potential to offer huge health, economic, and social benefits to developing communities.

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The Best Rice Cookers

I recommend a fuzzy logic rice cooker if you eat rice every day, basically making your cooker an always-on device. Your rice will take about twice as long to cook as it does in on-off rice cookers — but if rice is part of your daily routine, that will never be a concern. In a fuzzy logic cooker, there will …

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AeroGarden: Easy, Efficient Indoor Gardening

In 2004, MetaEfficient.com pre-reviewed the AeroGrow aeroponics growing system. That was before the system was released. A couple of years ago, you couldn’t cut on your TV without seeing an ad for AeroGrow indoor gardening systems. It isn’t as ubiquitously advertised now, but it hasn’t disappeared from the market. In fact, five years after its initial release, there are several …

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Visit To An Efficient Winebar

I don’t think I would have ever discovered this winebar, had I not been led to it, through the labyrinthine streets of Arlington, by Chantrea, who is the originator of what I have to call a noetic zymurgy. I followed Chantrea through the avenues, and into a restaurant. I don’t recall which one, but I ducked inside, and we both …

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Notes From The MetaEfficient Labs

Ozone Systems Won’t Directly Affect Pool PH Levels

I’ve been doing a lot of work in the MetaEfficient lab. I thought I would post an update on my experiments and research:

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Green Coffee Beans

Roasting your own coffee beans at home is quite simple. It takes about 5 to 15 minutes and you get the freshest coffee around. Green or raw coffee beans can be bought for $4 to $5 per pound, about half the price of the roasted kind. Look for fair-traded, organic coffee beans — it’s the metaefficient choice. Sweet Maria’s is …

World’s First Organic Tequila

4 Copas Tequila is said to be the world’s first organic tequila. The drink was certified by the international organization Bioagricert. The organic certification was announced at a gathering at the La Quemada distillery where 4 Copas is made, in Jalisco, Mexico. Named the Tequila of the Year 2006 by Wine & Spirits Magazine, the organic elixir is breaking into …

360 Vodka: Green Bottling

A new eco-friendly vodka has been launched by McCormick Distillery. The bottle is 80 percent recycled glass with a unique closure that looks a little like the Grolsch beer bottle. It seems like the vodka is not organic, which is disappointing (we sent a email to the company to confirm this. In the meantime you can see our organic vodka …

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Efficient: Making Organic Beer

If you are going to brew beer at home, why not brew organic? You’ll have clean tasting, fresh beer without using ingredients that are not genetically modified, and not grown with pesticides. Organic brewmaking ingredients cost slightly more but the rewards are worth the expense (in our moderately humble opinion). On a more technical side, organic malts on average have …