Adventures in Whole-Food, Plant-Based Eating
It is January 1, 2023, and 60 Minutes runs a story called “Obesity”. I can’t recall any other time when a 60 Minutes story was so self-contradictory and counter to my personal experience. It opens with Leslie Stahl saying “Almost half of American adults have obesity, a condition that was...
We are going to die. Short of suicide, we have no direct control over the reason or the means. We try to improve our odds, by managing the risks we take. Still, life cannot be completely safe. Accidents and illnesses can claim us, despite all our precautions. Yet, if we...
When I was perhaps four or five years old and my mother announced it was bedtime, I often used to say that I could not sleep, because I was not tired. I didn’t want to miss out on whatever went on among the grownups while I was asleep. Mom, knowing...
Lee gets a break, for once. Cruising through the Compass Rose subdivision, looking for packages to snag, and here comes a Package Express vehicle from the other direction. It passes, and Lee sees in the rear-view mirror where it stops. No hurry, proceed to the end of the block and...
At one level of description, everything that happens is extremely unlikely. So many other things could have happened, but didn’t. At another level, because it happened, everything seems to have been inevitable. I have seen several versions of a line of reasoning that goes something like this: the conditions required...
It is 2022, the last Thursday in September. After Senior Boot Camp, Kathryn and I, along with some other members of the class, check out the Health and Wellness Fair being held at the fabulous Rancho Cucamonga Community Center. We sign up and receive raffle tickets. There are over 100...
Writers on nutrition, like medical doctors in general, tend to express themselves with a great deal of certainty. Since there are so many areas of disagreement and so much marketing noise, this just confuses the lay public and undermines trust in doctors and medical research. Virtually all such research is...
My friend Vern and my cousin Jerry were very different people, but they had one thing in common. They both survived heart attacks and did not change their way of eating. They both died of second heart attacks. I have living friends who have survived heart attacks and have stents...
The Accident It is 2017, and I had a bad accident, so I’m in hospital for 4 weeks, followed by 3 weeks in inpatient rehab. At least I don’t have to shave, but I need help with everything, and I do mean everything. I was very lucky to only break...
My beautiful niece Hannah died at age 17 after prolonged suffering because of a reaction to a commonly prescribed drug that she took as directed. She became one of the iatrogenic deaths that are the third leading cause of all deaths in the United states. To be clear, this is...
