To see why Twinkies are cheap and fresh produce is expensive,"you need look no farther than the farm bill," according to this article in the New York Times: This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so…
American culture celebrates the quick fix. Diet pills like Trimspa and Ephedra enjoyed massive popularity despite their health risks because many people want to look healthy without actually living healthfully. Take a diet pill, pop a multivitamin instead of getting nutrients through food, starve yourself- it doesn’t matter how you…
Today, an acquaintance (I’ll call her “Laura”) asked me if I would buy some Girl Scout cookies from her daughter’s troop. I told her “No thank you.”
It’s not that I don’t enjoy eating Girl Scout cookies (I do enjoy Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies). It’s not that I generally oppose the activities of Girl Scouts. I approve of much of what Girl Scouts do.
Here’s what triggered this post. Laura told me that the average box of cookies sells for three dollars and that the average profit for each box of cookies is only fifty cents. Hmmmm.
Therefore, I can support their Girl Scouts to the same extent by handing $5 directly to the local troop or by buying $30 worth of cookies. Unless you think that eating cookies is an especially good thing, it makes much more sense to simply hand the local troop $5. Then again, eating cookies, especially a lot of cookies, is not a good thing. Cookies consist largely of refined carbohydrates and sugars. These are exactly the kinds of ingredients that invite obesity. Are the Girl Scouts concerned about obesity? Very much so (so am I), yet they continue to rely on cookie sales to fund their activities.
But let’s go back to the money for a moment. If you click here, you can see it stated that “all of the revenue” from cookie sales “stays with the local Girl Scout council that sponsors the sale.” The official site carefully …
Three weeks ago I noticed that I was overweight again, but I’m doing something about it again.
I’m not quite sure what did it. Maybe it was the almost-nightly bowl of ice cream or maybe those french fries weren’t really counteracted by those side dishes of broccoli. Whatever it was, three weeks ago I noticed that bad eating habits had kicked my weight more than 15 pounds over my usual weight. Those 15 extra pounds I was carrying around weighed as much as a bowling ball.
I’ve had to lose weight before. Five years ago, I decided that I was tired of carrying around lots of extra weight. Back then, I noticed how bad things had gotten after a friend showed me a photo of that 194 pound version of myself at the beach. Back then, I decided to see if I could lose 10 or 15 pounds. After doing a bit of research, I implemented a series of the eating and exercise strategies that worked well for me. They worked extremely well. I’m going to share them in this post. I dropped more than 4 pounds per week, week after week, until my 194 pound carcass melted into 159 pounds, a swing of 35 pounds. After I got going with my program, it was almost painless. I found myself feeling better and I looked better. Based upon well-established statistics, I knew that I had substantially decreased my chance of being afflicted with heart disease, stroke and various kinds of …
How should you take care of them? According to one book I’m reading, you need to give them lots of exercise and they need to eat good food. You need to buy a good leash and collar. No, I’m not referring to a childcare book–I’m talking about a book on dog care: The Complete Dog Care Manual, by Bruce Fogel, president of ASPCA.
To use a dog book to raise a child, you’ve got to pick and choose the advice, of course. You don’t put your children on leashes or toss them bones (except when they misbehave!). It is interesting, though, that dog-raising books are full of good ideas that also apply to raising children. And it’s especially interesting to compare the way we are supposed to raise dogs with the way many people actually raise children.
My family has a dog (“Holly”) and two human children, aged 6 and 8. I am thus an expert on this topic.
My dog-training book stresses that taking care of a dog requires a lot of work. We need to invest a lot of time in order to have a healthy animal. The dog book places a premium on early training? “Your dog relies on you to train it from an early age to be trusting, even-tempered and sociable…” (page 48). Compare this advice with the way many people actually raise children, ignoring them for long stretches and often abandoning them to the commercial wasteland of television.
Feeding is critically important, according …