Healthy and Simple

I love Shirley, but sometimes she does things that are not just rotten, they pretty much amount to cruel and unusual punishment. She is always singing or humming songs. Sometimes it’s a wonderful classic, but sometimes it’s a trite commercial that she grew up listening to. And sometimes it’s something as awful as a Captain [...]

Sometimes something seems so obvious you don’t even need to point it out. But not apparently if you are a medical researcher. It seems that nothing is so patently clear that they can’t find some pretext to get research dollars to tell us what we already know.
For instance, a new study in the journal Spine says [...]

So our great friend, and English correspondent, Vicki told me the other day that many of our blog postings are clearly not written with parents in mind because many of the things we talk about or encourage people to do are things that parents just don’t have time for.
And after taking care of baby Emma [...]

I love getting the New York Times on Sundays and devouring it, curled up in my favorite chair sipping a cup of coffee!  It’s a luxury to me to be able to “really” read the paper and absorb the stories rather than just race through and grab information from the newspaper while getting ready to [...]

I love ads for junky products. There’s something fascinating about watching a commercial for a product that is so utterly useless that it cross over into another realm and leaves you thinking “That would be fun to have.”

Like a Chia Pet for example. They are ugly, silly, pointless and yet millions of people have [...]

Despite all the bad things happening in the world this is still a pretty amazing time. Most of us are fortunate enough to have  homes, good health, food, friends and family that love us. But sometimes I think we take too much for granted. We don’t appreciate how so much of the world around us [...]

A woman I work with – let’s call her Carolyn, because that’s her name – recently underwent back surgery. She says since the surgery she’s been in some pain, not just in her back but pretty much throughout her body. At first she thought it was just the usual recovery process, but as the pain [...]

Sometimes it feels as if you can’t turn around without bumping into another study that tells you how wonderful exercise is. Most of it is stuff you probably already know – at least it is if you read Health and Simple regularly – but once in a while you come across some fun new benefit [...]

Sometimes when you watch the news or just see what is happening all around you it’s easy to get a tad gloomy about the prospects for the world. War, famine, murder, disaster, corruption. It’s misery on a grand scale and you look around at the next generation and wonder if they are capable of making [...]

The news from Haiti has been so bleak and painful since the earthquake hit that it’s been hard to absorb it all. An estimated 200,000 people dead; hundreds of thousands more homeless, badly injured, or without any means to feed themselves and their family. Watching those images of suffering, of people with broken bones who may die because [...]