Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Peace, love, positive energy. "...it's like a second skin. I don't leave the house without protection and guidance," goes a current radio ad. The voice actress isn't talking about carrying a map and some condoms. Does the peace, love and positive energy bit mean, for instance, helping homeless youth , or raising awareness about foster care , or fighting city hall ? No, all those things are hard. The annoying radio ad is about Alex and Ani jewelry: " positive energy products that adorn the body, enlighten the mind, and empower the spirit. " I love jewelry. What I don't love is the message that wearing jewelry will make you smarter, positive or more courageous. It's a no-effort solution, and like almost all no-effort solutions, it's bunkum. It's the twenty-first century, and yet a big business can be built on a bunch of BS. Want to empower your spirit--for real? Even where magic really does exist, people (like Harry Potter) need cou

At lunch today a couple of coworkers mentioned how icky they found meat. What a nice topic of conversation! If we hadn't been at the table, I'd have mentioned that plants process poop .

A few weeks ago, I was wondering, smugly, how many people at the airport wheeling their bags along were paying for gym memberships. Everyone--to a person--had wheeled luggage except me: as long as my old suitcase holds out, I won't buy another one. And I wasn't willing to pay $40 to check my luggage cart. Three months after my accident, my fractured arm was well enough to carry a week's worth of clothes and toiletries, and so it was pressed into service. After all, I'd pushed, sawed and hammered my fence back into place and planted 15 or 20 plants a few weeks before without a problem. With this in mind, I didn't think my first workout in three months would be too hard. And for my legs and abs (which weren't injured in my bike wreck in late July), it wasn't. At first, the upper body workout wasn't hard--I got through three and a half Slow Burn pushups without undue hardship. But the weights felt twice as heavy as they used to. Did a five-pound weight r

A coworker asked me today if I was familiar with a book called "Bread Belly" or somesuch. "Wheat Belly? Yes," I said, "I'm very familiar with it." Her husband bought the book after a friend of his raved about it, having lost 65 pounds on Dr. Davis's wheat-free, low-carb way of eating. The friend is a wheat farmer. "What's he going to do, knowing that wheat is so bad?" "I suppose he'll be like a diabetic sugar farmer, who can't have sugar even though other people can have it, or he could grow corn or soybeans." If the wheat-free wheat farmer continues his food education, he'll learn that growing any of these things isn't any great service to his countrymen. Will he do something better with his farm? Or will he be like cigarette executives who don't smoke or entertainers who don't let their kids listen to their work?

Sweetened tea is good for you? Handouts for dental patients that don't mention restricting sugar? Controlling diabetes by eating less fat? None of these recommendations from the Center for Disease Control, Prevention's National Diabetes Education Program and a health guru & author made any sense to Denver dentist Cristen Kearns Couzens. But instead of drinking the Kool-Aid, she researched how nonsense became policy. After quitting her job to do her research full time, Couzens uncovered evidence documenting specious industry-sponsored studies and boards staffed with members friendly to (that is, paid by) the sugar industry. Last year, she contacted Gary Taubes at a lecture in Denver , and the two have written an article for Mother Jones magazine. Need some humor? Check out vintage ads touting sugar as a weight loss tool. Slideshow: "Enjoy an Ice Cream Cone Shortly before Lunch " Articles in Morther Jones magazine: Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies How

I've recently been on vacation. Some wonderful things from my trip: I bought a pound of hot Italian sausage from Royer Farms , Indiana, purchased at the Broad Ripple Farmers Market in Indianapolis. Tasty, tender and pasture raised, but hot? Not even mild by Denver standards. I'm enjoying the Canterbury tea made of black tea, mango and flowers from a store called Tea Pots 4 U , who blends it for the Canterbury Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. (Call the store if you want to order it.)  Near Tea Pots 4 U in Indianapolis ***** Lincoln Park, Chicago. Possibly North Cleveland Avenue. My best friend and I took the Megabus to Chicago and stayed in Lincoln Park. Back in Indianapolis, I downloaded from a book from the Denver Public Library to my Kindle called City Walks: Chicago by Christina Henry deTessan. We walked the Lincoln Park Architecture tour in the rain. I got cold and wet with no coat, and her feet hurt, but the beauty of the area made it worth it. I'v

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. -Archimedes By conventional wisdom, I should be a fat, lazy slob. I eat at McDonald's, play a lot of video games and watch violent cartoons when I get home. I haven't exercised in months, not since my accident in late July. I have my reasons for these things, but they're not important here. What's important is that these things haven't turned me into anything. I'm still slim and trim (though I've lost some muscle tone), still thinking critically, and my coworkers and creditors can still depend on me. Today I even downloaded a book on salt--400 pages written by an engineer in 1898.* It's unlikely to be light reading. My point is the difference between what matters and what doesn't. The endless worries about fat and salt and dietary cholesterol don't matter. Chronic cardio--exercise that's supposed to make you lose weight--doesn't matter (unless