Healthy and Simple

Disasters often bring out the best in people. The recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile led to an outpouring of support – both financial and emotional – from people all over the world for the victims of the quakes. Millions of ordinary individuals, many of whom are going through tough times themselves, donated money to [...]

The budget deficit is soaring, we are trillions in debt and the economy is in a shambles, so how are we going to dig ourselves out of this hole? One idea being bandied around is introducing something called VAT. It stands for Value Added Tax but having grown up with it in England I can [...]

So, everyday the staff here at Healthy and Simple try to come up with new ideas, new approaches, new thoughts on how   you  can lead a healthier, happier life. We are very creative in trying to make the best of a bad situation but some    days
you hear something that has us shaking our [...]

I was listening to NPR’s. Terry Gross interview William Hurt, the actor, on “Fresh Air” and he said something very truthful.  You know the feeling, when someone is talking and suddenly a what they say, just rings of truth and deeper meaning to you?  If that never happens to you maybe you just haven’t been [...]

There are certain absolute rules in life. There is the Newtonian principle that a body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion remains in constant motion unless an external force is applied. There is the lesser known but still equally true law that states that the less talent a celebrity has the [...]

When I was a journalist we always worked with a basic rule in mind; if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Now, it wasn’t because we were all hard-headed cynical bastards who didn’t believe anything,  it’s because experience had taught us to suspect that stories or people who seemed just a [...]

I worked in TV news for more than 20 years and met some incredible, wonderfully creative, ethical, honest, funny, super smart people. They tried to do the best they could every day. Many of them are still trying, against what seems like increasing odds, to do serious, worthwhile journalism in the face of pressure to [...]

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 [...]

Some people call their kids the weirdest names. I remember reading about a family in Scotland, the McCann’s, who called their son Genghis. It was probably funny for about five minutes before it left him scarred for life. Pop star Bob Geldoff called his daughter Fifi Trixiebelle! Now there’s a gal who is in for a lot of therapy. [...]

You may have heard a fanfare of trumpets the other day when it was announced that obesity levels in the US have flattened. Not fattened. Flattened. That doesn’t mean obesity levels are going down, only that they are no longer going up. Two thirds of American adults and one third of American kids are still [...]