Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Here are some great Black Friday deals--all ONLINE--that can benefit your health. I've used most of these products and vendors and recommend them. I'm not an affiliate.  Vitamins iHerb.com is having a 25% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday site-wide sale. Vitacost.com is offering $10 off $50, stackable with a variety of other deals. Tried and True Supplements I use: Doctor's Best magnesium ( peach powder , unflavored powder , and tablets ) Country Life kelp tablets Solgar zinc, 22 mg NOW vitamin D, 5,000 IU NOW astaxanthin, 4 mg Jarrow hyaluronic acid, 120 mg Solaray vitamin C tablets, 485 mg Collagen Powder, Dips, Dressings, Mayo and Sauces Primal Kitchen products--all made without added sugar or Frankenfoods--are on sale. If you remember Mark Sisson from the Mark's Daily Apple blog, Primal Kitchen is his company. PrimalKitchen.com  (25% off this week only) iHerb.com  (25% off) Vitacost.com (20% off) I love their vanilla, peanut butter and chocolate-mint collagen pow

A common ingredient in many cold medicines has been shown so ineffective that the FDA recently proposed taking it off the market. The ingredient, phenylephrine, "failed to outperform placebo pills in patients with cold and allergy congestion," say researchers from the University of Florida. "The same researchers also challenged the drug's effectiveness in 2007, but the FDA allowed the products to remain on the market pending additional research," according to CNBC .  Mostly placebos. Photo from Pixabay . I can attest that phenylephrine doesn't work. Before I stopped eating wheat, I constantly had nasal and sinus congestion. I helped keep Sudafed in business when the active ingredient was pseudoephedrine, but I noticed the PE (phenylephrine) variety didn't work at all. The only other decongestants I've found helpful are guaifenesin (Mucinex) and spicy food. Mucinex is expensive because it works! (The cheaper store brands work just as well, though.) Su

 

The past few months have found me shuffling out of bed in the morning with stiff, painful achilles tendons. I've never experience anything like it, even when I was lindy hopping a couple of nights a week for twelve years.  I also started getting muscle strain last spring after doing normal chores around the house and yard--so much so that I added a chiropractor's YouTube channel to my feed on this site. I have muscle pain in my lower back and sternum that have improved but haven't gone away despite going to a chiropractor IRL.  Be careful of medicines, even if they're topical. Photo from Pexels . All of this happened after taking Cipro antibiotic drops for an eye infection . Cipro is a fluoroquinolone (a type of antibiotic) with a black box warning about tendonitis and tendon rupture, and another warning about "mental health side effects and serious blood sugar disturbances," according to the FDA. The side effects involving tendons, muscles, joints, nerves an

That's what the title should have been for my blog post last June about the benefits I'd seen from strength training . Being happily ignorant of the big butt craze, I went on about losing enough fat to need new pants and lowering my fasting insulin. Maybe I should have been clear that my waist size went down and butt got bigger. (Sorry, no before and after shots--I don't take pictures of my ass.) Photo from Pixabay . The closest thing you'll get to a butt picture here. I only heard about the big butt craze a few days ago when YouTube suddenly started putting a bunch of BBL (Brazilian butt lift) videos in my feed. I have no idea why those came up. But some of the plastic surgeons making the videos have said that it's the riskiest plastic surgery--so risky that some of them won't do it--and that implants you sit on all day are going to move around.  Brave AI lists the risks of BBLs as fat embolism (potentially fatal), high mortality rate (1 in 3,000), loss of fat

I keep seeing riled-up Gen Xers on YouTube. You'd better watch out, because Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980) is tough--so tough that some of us looked after ourselves home alone after school, played unsupervised and drank out of hoses when we were kids. The riled-up ones on YouTube might send some very mean tweets. Screen shot from The Goonies. They're late to the party. It was mostly other Gen-Xers who were riled up four years ago, leading the way against lockdowns and forced vaccinations: Alex Berenson (investigative journalist who successfully sued Twitter), Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying ( professors in exile  previously pursued by baseball bat wielding goons at Evergreen), Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta (co-authors of The Great Barrington Declaration ), Aseem Malhotra (cardiologist who took the shot, then started campaigning to end the shots after his father died suddenly of a heart attack after  his  shot), Ron De Santis and Kristi Noem (governors of Florida and

If you don't like fermented foods because they're too tart or sour, you might like these pickles. There's no vinegar or sharp taste. Even the onions are mild. They're not sweet, either, even though the recipe calls for brown sugar: the bacteria consume most or all of the sugar. They're just mild, savory pickles. There's no need to add culture because cucumbers naturally have  L. plantarum  bacteria on their surface.  Equipment needed 1 quart canning jar* with ring and lid (or fermenting lid) 1 fermentation weight or small, clean stones in a Ziploc baggie Ingredients 1 pound pickling cucumbers** (not salad cucumbers), preferably unwashed 1/4 sweet onion (like Vidalia) 1 teaspoon juniper berries 1 teaspoon turmeric 1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns 1/2 teaspoon anise seed 1 tablespoon brown sugar 3 tablespoons pickling salt or other salt without iodine 1/4 teaspoon pickle crisp Filtered water free of chlorine Instructions Rinse the cucumbers in the filtered water