Medicine wears off. If you take a pill, its benefit might last for 12 or even 24 hours, and then you have to take another one. The same holds true for acupuncture. Although administered differently – inserting very thin needles through your skin at strategic points – its effects tend to fade just as […]
Do you feel connected, or tethered? While you’re mulling that over, here’s another one: Can you handle downtime? The art of loafing — made famous by such characters as Huckleberry Finn; the morbidly obese passengers of the spaceship, Axiom, in the Pixar movie WALL-E; and cats everywhere – has its good points. There’s something to […]
This post, as many Vital Jake posts do, came because of a conversation I happened to have with a guy at church. He said he felt bad, and that he had been waking up with itchy eyes and a headache. I asked him how often he changed his sheets, and he was stumped. He didn’t […]
Good news for people who love barbecue, hot dogs, burgers, and steak cooked on the grill: It pays to eat your veggies. The key to this story is something called “PhIP.” A few years ago, noted Johns Hopkins scientist Bill Nelson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, began investigating its role […]
A broken heart. Shoveling snow. Being a weekend warrior. Eating like a pig, no offense to pigs. What do these things have in common? They all have the potential to cause a heart attack. They could kill you. “But wait!” you may say. “I exercise. I have a good diet. Gosh darn it, […]
In 2002, when I ghostwrote the first edition of The Paleo Diet for Loren Cordain, I thought we were writing sacrilege when he said people need sunlight. That’s because our view of what’s normal and natural has gotten skewed. “Oh, no!” I thought. “Must have sunscreen. Sunscreen good, sun bad!” Just a few steps away […]
Imagine: John Wayne in True Grit, charging bad guys on horseback, with the reins in his teeth, a Colt revolver in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other, and suddenly, he veers off and heads for the woods. He’s acutely regretting that cup of coffee he had back at the campfire. Well, […]