Category: Health

Organic SKUs

 How do you tell organic produce apart from commercial produce?

I was cleaning out some old files and I found some brief notes I jotted down about how to know from the SKU ( barcode ).

  • conventionally farmed produce has an item-dependent, fixed, 4-digit numbering system (ex. bananas are #4011)
  • organic produce is marked by 5-digit SKU beginning with the number 9 (#94011)
  • genetically modified produce is marked by 5-digit SKU beginning with the number 8 (#84011)

HTH

🙂

A President’s Diet

President Bill Clinton is an alumnus of Georgetown University where he was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. You can disagree with his politics or his marital ethics, but you can’t call President Clinton a dummy. As a former President of the United States he is one of the most powerful men in the world and he has access to the best medical care possible. No technique, no researcher is beyond his reach. Given all of that, I encourage you to watch this CNN interview with President Clinton and Wolf Blitzer about what he did to repair his health after his coronary surgery.

Heart disease and cancer are the top two killers of Americans.

Orthorexia In The News

I got into reading about nutrition for fun when I was a teenager. I started off with the pop diet and nutrition books found in the local mall. I remember, from all of those years ago, a book called “Are You Confused?” by Paavlo Airola. The rhetorical question from his title was referring to the cacophony of contradictory nutrition advice in popular books. He wrote that if someone was to adhere to each rule from all of those systems that person wouldn’t eat any food at all.

It looks like there are some people that do that.

Its called orthorexia, a term for a new eating disorder. Orthorexia is about being obsessive with rules for healthy eating( true or not ) to the point where adherence to those rules starts destroying your health or taking over your life.

I found this interesting piece from ABC New’s “20/20” with John Stossel on youtube.

I wasn’t 100% comfortable with John Stossel confronting one of these nutrition folklore gurus ( part 2, 5:20 ), Viktoras Kulvinskas, in a harsh way, but part of me felt like what Stossel said had to be said. You will see that this particular guru looks like anything but the picture of health, yet he preaches his system with an almost religious-like fervor. Stossel stopped him in the middle of the conversation, pointed out that he was only 8 years older than Stossel, but looked several decades older.

I felt really bad for the recovering orthorexics interviewed. I was amazed that people could be that thin and still be alive. I felt badly for them.

Part 1

Part 2