Healthy Body. Healthy Mind
The supplement industry is big business, and just about everyone I know takes one or more supplements daily—including me and every member of my family. There is often an assumption that supplements are a simple form of insurance that can help halt or reverse poor lifestyle choices. They are also seen as a remedy for a bad diet. Finally, they are perceived as harmless substances that, worst case scenario, you just pee away.
All false.
[Read more…]
I was listening to a Wall Street Journal podcast the other day in which Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, a leading NYC oncologist, was interviewed about the rise of cancer rates around the world. Although treatments are improving, the study found that “between 1990 and 2013, the proportion of all deaths caused by cancer rose from 12 to 15 percent worldwide.” This isn’t because there’s been a reduction in people dying from heart disease, which is currently the number one killer in the US: “No, it’s actual increase in the numbers.”
According to Dr. Gaynor, “we’re living in a world where about one in three people are going to hear the words, ‘You have cancer.’ And even more worrisome, it looks like that trend is continuing to increase. So, we’re probably headed toward a one in two over the next 5 to 10 years.”
Why is this happening? He continues: “Well, I think the reasons can basically be broken down into two general areas. One, we’re living in more of a fast-food, processed-food culture, and that’s spreading around the world. So, we’re eating more refined sugar, we’re eating more refined flour, we’re consuming more heat-damaged vegetable oils that preserve shelf life, and all of those turn on tumor-promoting genes, inflammatory genes which promote cancer, and promotes obesity which in turn promotes cancer.” Second: “There’s more and more environmental pollution—in the air we breathe, in the water that we’re drinking, in the pesticide and herbicide residues in food.”
So, here we have a traditionally trained oncologist, credentialed up the wazoo, pinpointing the S.A.D. (standard American diet) and its toxic environmental impact as the central culprits in rising cancer rates. With our food culture having been exported around the globe, the study found similar trends in Asia and Europe. “Over the next twenty years or so, it’s expected cancer is going to exceed heart disease as the number one cause of death.” And for us women, he added the prediction by the lead statistician at NIH, Dr. Phillip Rosenberg, that “breast cancer rates for American women by the year 2030 would increase by 50 percent.” That’s in fifteen years, not very far off.
Epigenetics is the study of how environmental and other external factors change the expression of our genes and the way in which our cells interpret our genes, and it’s central to understanding why diet impacts one’s vulnerability to cancer. We are all born with a unique genetic print, and some of us are more prone to disease and illness than others. But this needn’t necessarily be a death sentence. As Dr. Joel Kahn explains: “Our fork is so powerful it can not only transport food to our mouth, it can be used as a genetic on and off switch to alter our weight, blood pressure, blood cholesterol, cancer growth, and even our chances of healthy aging.”
You know what I find utterly baffling? Medical students do not study nutrition. My little sister, Tova, is entering her final year of med school and hasn’t spent five minutes on the topic of nutrition since she got there. She’s learning all about cutting and drugs, but absolutely nothing about foods that aid in disease prevention. Medical students are being educated to treat sick people rather than helping people avoid becoming sick in the first place.
If you’re like me, you are hearing ever more bad news about ever younger people in your community being stricken with cancer. The resources on the food/disease connection are all out there in plain sight, but perhaps the average person considers them too “fringe.” That excuse is no longer tenable as we now have a classically trained, leading oncologist supporting this concept and pinpointing a way for us to be proactive. In case feeling and looking our best doesn’t motivate us to put down the cupcake, chips, fast food, candy, and frappuccino, perhaps Dr. Gaynor has hit upon something that will.
Learning CPR is one of those things we all know we should do but usually don’t take the time for. It seems so unlikely that we’d be put in a situation where it was needed, and it probably is. But you could save a life, and it could be that of your parent, child, or friend. And what if you see a stranger collapse? How would you feel just helplessly standing there, knowing you could’ve saved this person—who is someone else’s parent, child, or friend?
Here is a brief video my brother-in-law sent me that I confess has been sitting in my inbox for months. It demonstrates Continuous Chest Compression CPR—a form of CPR that’s simpler to administer and more effective than traditional mouth-to-mouth. I occasionally notice the video there, only to think to myself that I’ll watch it another time, when I have time. Today I was cleaning out my inbox and saw it, and thought to myself: What if, god forbid, today is the day?
I watched it immediately and wanted to remind all my readers that this is something they need to see. I myself have taken CPR courses at least three times since I was a teenager lifeguarding at camp, but I’ve forgotten details. The great thing about the current form of CPR is that it’s so simple, there are almost no details to forget.
Here’s the link. Let’s all invest five minutes of our day today that could save someone from disability or death. You don’t want to be the one left standing there.
After reading a KaleandKant post last summer on the toxic chemicals that sustain manicured lawns, my husband, David, joked: “Why don’t you launch a blog that’s called: If you like it, it’s bad for you.com“? We are, of course, bombarded in the media with the sick, the bad, and the evil. But since our run on this planet is pretty short, it’s sad not to process the worrisome as quickly as possible and move on to the good, the life affirming, and the fun.
Since we adults sometimes need help with that, one idea I really like is Dr. Andrew Weil’s concept of a periodic “news fast.” When was the last time you turned on CNN or opened the NYT and heard about an act of kindness, a positive health trend, or something good going on in Russia, the Middle East, or even Washington DC?
The worst news outfits are those that devote 24/7 coverage to things like a little girl falling down a well and the ensuing, painstaking rescue effort. It’s horrible, terrible, and I pray that the child is rescued quickly. But do we really need Nancy Grace’s play-by-play for twenty hours? What good could this sick voyeurism do?
Today, let’s pause to reflect on what’s inspirational and wonderful. Here are some of my favorite quotes. David, and everyone, please enjoy and have a nice day!
“Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out.” Randall Munroe
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” Soren Kierkegaard
“The best time to plant a tree is twenty-five years ago. The second best time is today.” Unknown
“Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” Oscar Wilde
“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” Albert Einstein
“We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.” E. B. White
“Use those talents you have. You will make it. You will give joy to the world. Take this tip from nature: The woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except those who sang best.” Bernard Meltzer
“Each day holds a surprise. But only if we expect it can we see, hear, or feel it when it comes to us. Let’s not be afraid to receive each day’s surprise, whether it comes to us as sorrow or as joy. It will open a new place in our hearts, a place where we can welcome new friends and celebrate more fully our shared humanity.” Henri Nouwen
When my daughter was three, she had a severe respiratory infection that required overnight hospitalization. Our local hospital is medically cutting-edge, and I was confident she’d receive the best care. What shocked me was the food they served her. Similarly, my father-in-law, who passed away in 2011, spent the final four months of his life in and out of the hospital. Again, the daily fare was not only tasteless and vile from a culinary standpoint, but a nutritional mess. Medical science is advancing at an unprecedented speed. What is going on with the nutrition science that guides hospital food services? Is anybody home?
This is not exactly news. The Internet is littered with stories about such hospital meals as roast beef for cardiac patients, and wings and hotdogs for kids. Many, many hospitals have one or more fast food restaurants in their lobbies, or just take it upon themselves to offer such dishes to patients as chicken-fried steak. A British fellow photographed a series of meals and challenged people to identify the food—”hospital food bingo.” Over half of the respondents could not! Kids are loaded up with white bread, Jell-O, cookies, syrupy and slimy fruit, funky processed meats, and gray, lifeless vegetables that even a vegan would rather starve than eat. A study published in Academic Pediatrics found that in Californian hospitals only 7% of entrees classify as being “healthy.” The saturated fat and sodium levels in much hospital food could alone keep you as an inpatient. And try finding a healthy snack in the lobby shops. Chips, candy, soda—you might as well be at the gas station.
Okay, I confess: I was reading Oprah magazine the other day. But it had some really good stuff! Like a brief interview with Renée Fleming, the famous soprano who just won a Grammy for Best Classical Vocal Solo. Bitch can sing, and she’s smart.
Fleming shared a few worthwhile pieces of lifestyle advice.
1. Make time for joy. Life quickly becomes drudgery if you only focus on “shoulds.” Look inside and sprinkle your daily life with bits of fun and pleasure. Fleming talks about her sunset walks around Paris. Plebs like you and me might wanna think about reading more, sneaking out to that matinee, or sharing a glass of wine more often with friends.
Here’s something none of us ever do: berate ourselves for something we said or did, challenge our abilities and worth, tell ourselves that we suck and that our problems would be solved if only we were like some other seemingly-perfect person.
Aristotle once famously said that “a friend is another self.” To this we might humbly add: “the self should be another friend.” Selfishness that harms others is obviously bad, but there is a good and necessary form of self-love without which we cannot be happy.
Last summer I came across a good article on the matter: “Self-Help for Skeptics: Train Your Brain to Be Positive, and Feel Happier Every Day: It Only Sounds Corny” (WSJ, 8/27/12). Corny is the understatement, but it’s worth reading.
Really boring book title, really fascinating book–especially for those, like me, who are savers. Are you a saver? Are there people in your life with simple misconceptions that make them unhappy and that you’d love to disabuse them of? For instance, my kids’ view that I’m a “health freak,” and that they’d be much better off stuffing themselves with the “regular” food served by “normal” moms? Or a coworker’s view that if she just tried the latest diet, she’d soon be thin and all her problems solved? Or a divorced friend’s idea that avoiding all social interaction is a good plan?
David Brooks examined this book recently in his NYT column, where he summarized some of its most counterintuitive findings, such as: people are not motivated to vote because you tell them there is low voter turnout, but rather because you tell them that all of their peers are voting; people wrongly assume they are consuming less of a beverage in a short, wide glass than in a tall, narrow one; and those police officers given post-trauma grief-counseling often end up worse-off because it enhances and enlivens the tragic experience. Brooks discusses the ramifications of these findings in the context of wrong-headed public policy, but as savers who operates locally, they force us to rethink our efforts to help the people we care about. [Read more…]
If you don’t already follow Jane Brody’s “Personal Health” column in the NY Times, you might consider starting to. She discusses every imaginable health-related topic with both balance and a practical angle. Her most recent article examines the fallout from many modern medical tests, namely their “ability to damage DNA and, 10 to 20 years later, to cause cancer. CT scans alone, which deliver 100 to 500 times the radiation associated with an ordinary X-ray and now provide three-fourths of Americans’ radiation exposure, are believed to account for 1.5 percent of all cancers that occur in the United States.”
This is a personal matter for me because radiation killed my beloved mother-in-law, Arlene, in 2002. It wasn’t the medical testing, but radiation treatments to deal with lung cancer, that caused DNA changes leading to her ultimate death from secondary cancer. The initial treatments did “cure” the lung cancer and give her many additional years of life–and it’s not like our family had any other options at the time—but the lesson is that, as Brody remarks, “radiation, like alcohol, is a double-edged sword.” [Read more…]
Check out Dawn Lerman’s touching NYT series, Growing up with a Fat Dad, in which she chronicles a childhood spent with a mother who never cooked, and a father who ballooned to 450 lbs. as he worked his way through every fad diet known to man. She talks about how their diet of processed, packaged food, and nothing home-cooked, left her feeling empty and hungry in all sorts of ways.
Though Lerman’s parents were not abusive–just utterly oblivious to their child’s basic needs—Lerman’s grandmother, Beauty, rescued her on weekends. When she’d walk into her grandmother’s kitchen on Friday nights, she’d touch nirvana as she glimpsed the beautifully-set dinner table and abundant fresh produce, and got a noseful of the scents of homemade soup and freshly-baked muffins. “My grandmother was my mentor and my savior. She poured love and stability into my life, one recipe at a time.” When Lerman’s family moved away, Beauty sent her weekly shopping lists and money so she could cook for herself, along with recipes that “filled my body and soul.” [Read more…]