Pain, Pain, Go Away!

This just arrived in my email: Today the Institute for Justice will file a First Amendment case in North Carolina, where our client, Steve Cooksey, is being threatened with criminal charges for sharing through his website dietary tips and advice that saved his life. State officials are demanding that Steve acquire a government-issued dietician’s license in order to offer insights through a Dear Abby-style column. To learn more, please watch this short video about the case: www.ij.org/paleospeechvideo . Thank you for making this and all our work possible. Chip

Clear skin. When I ate some cheese last week, though, I had a crop of pimples that night. (They weren't hormonal.) Less frequent appetite. I spent an uncomfortable week adjusting to bigger, less frequent meals. It was nothing I tried to do--I just went by my appetite.I've been skipping lunch half the time, which I rarely did before. (I've been extremely busy at work, though, so this might have something to do with it.) Fewer and lighter nosebleeds.  I need less sleep. (My stress level from work and everything else might have something to do with that, again.)

Question for readers: Have any of you cured or treated fibromyalgia with diet, supplements, etc.? What worked? What didn't? This is not a rhetorical question--I have an idea for a fibromyalgia diet, and the research I've done so far is encouraging, but I'd like a reality check. A friend of mine is suffering terribly and I'd like to help her.

The Japanese and other Asians are often held up as models of carb-eating skinnies. Should we adopt a traditional Japanese diet, then? Naomi Moriyama, author of Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat (1) thinks so. "There is a land...where forty-year-old women look like they are twenty. It is a land where women enjoy some of the world's most delicious food, yet they have obesity rates of only three percent ...The country is Japan." Moriyama goes on to describe her mother's cooking, which she says helped her and her husband slim down. If you've tried to lose weight on healthy whole grains, good carbs, exercise, and following standard nutritional advice, a traditional Japanese diet won't work for you--because that's what it's all about. In fact, the book specifically says that the diet is similar to USDA guidelines. (And in an unintentionally ironic passage, Moriyama complains that she couldn't exercise off even "an ounce" of the 25 poun...

Long ago, nobody messed with Mother Nature (much). Mostly, nobody knew how, and the traditional ways were common sense. Along came the chemical age, and then the backlash. Some say anything from a lab is harmful; others say Mother Nature alone is not enough. Of course, I'm talking about gardening. In general, gardeners seem to be on one side or the other: chemicals should be avoided entirely, or the only good bug is a dead bug. (Conversion is possible, though: a friend of mine was fervently anti-chemical until her apartment got a bedbug infestation.) Jeff Gillman, a professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota has chosen a different side: looking at the evidence. His book The Truth About Organic Gardening tips over some of the sacred cows of both camps: For instance, natural pesticides aren't necessarily safer than synthetic ones (good to know if you eat organic fruit, since natural pesticides are used on organically grown fruit). And bug sprays can make an inf...

A few months ago, after suddenly gaining a pound a day, and by sheer coincidence, reading The Paleo Answer by Loren Cordain describing the insulin-spiking effects of dairy, I changed my diet. I gave away my custard and low-carb ice cream and cut way back on the half and half. I've kept eating cheese--it doesn't have much insulin-spiking effect, according to Cordain. I stopped gaining weight and dropped three pounds, but I'm still up five pounds from my weight before my sinus infection. Nevertheless, all my clothes still fit (albeit a little tighter). (I had just taken a gigantic dose of vitamin D. I like to imagine my weight gain being mostly bone mass.) Other effects ensued. Since I'm not sure how to put this delicately, I'll just say it: I smell better. Before, when I went for a leisurely walk in warm weather, my Right Guard took a left turn. I had to soak a lot of my shirts in Biz to make them smell fresh. But last weekend, for example,when I was putting i...

Can you be too thin? Certainly--but in a day when the average American man and woman weigh 191 and 164 pounds(1), and some athletes have bulked up with steroids, some people have lost perspective of what "too thin" is. Maybe somebody should tell these civic-minded Russians in miniskirts to let a tractor shovel the snow, lest they faint on the sidewalk. Better drop that log!   And those clay water jars!   That paleo diet is going to kill you!  Better take up dainty activity of gardening instead-- er, wait ... The pictures show that people can be thin, strong and energetic. Yet my best friend worries about me and my diet because she thinks I'm too thin (even though we both have about the same energy level--and she has health problems that I don't). My mom thinks I'm too thin, too, but she grew up in the thirties and forties, when thinness was associated with malnutrition. "Of the first million men screened by draft boards in 1940," says the article ...