June 7th, 2006
Dear Straight Talk: How bad is it to sunbathe? I’m 15 and I love having a tan.—C.R., Folsom
Dear C.R.: Californians do love their tans but I worry about young people who have spent your childhoods around a back-yard pool shaded by a tattered awning of ozone.
Even with my Italian skin, I don’t expose my skin to direct sun for more than ten minutes before applying sunscreen, seeking shade, or throwing on a hat and an un-buttoned, long-sleeved shirt. The skin of the face and neck, and especially the skin around the eyes, is extremely sensitive. I know too many adults in their thirties and forties who constantly deal with skin cancer around the eyes.
Diseases of the eye are becoming common, too. I hate to advocate sunglasses, but unless it’s midnight and you’re at Denny’s, I’m advocating sunglasses. Make sure they give full UV protection.
If you insist on sunbathing (having a case of that incorrigible teenage invincibility), please, no more than five to ten minutes depending on your skin type. Never sunbathe your face, neck, eyelids, or upper back. They get enough sun incidentally. Use an umbrella or towel to shade these parts of your body while sunbathing.
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December 28th, 2005
Dear Readers: Shall we talk about food? Now that we’re stuffed from the holidays, resolved to go to the gym and start that diet?
In classes I teach for teens, I explain that humans actually have four bodies. No, not four stomachs! (Despite the obesity crisis, we are not cows!) I’m talking about the four bodies of the human—which the teens figure correctly to be the physical body, the mental body, the emotional body, and the spiritual body.
What has happened to these bodies in the last 50 years? Why is obesity an epidemic? Why is mental illness the largest world-wide human disability (surpassing cancer)? What has happened to emotional commitment, with over a third of all babies in the US born to unmarried women? And what is the meaning of life? (It’s not really designer jeans, is it?)
Like a crumbling pyramid, all four “bodies” of the human need repair and I want to share with you some ideas to take into the New Year.
Since foundations are crucial, let’s start with the physical body, the base of the pyramid. Not only are we obese, but our children are plagued with allergies, asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure. (Can you imagine being a kid with high blood pressure!?)
So, yes, let’s talk about food….. because what we eat is easily responsible for 90% of our problems.
Does anyone have a clue what the ideal human diet is? We are so without a compass that half the population recently bought into the idea of eliminating carbohydrates! I hope that means you’ll have an open mind to what I’m going to say….
I want to share with you the work of Dr. Weston A. Price. Price was a retired dentist, who, in the early 1900s searched the globe for clans of people with perfect teeth. He figured if he could find perfect teeth, he would find perfect health. His idea of perfection was strict. Tooth decay had to be absolutely unheard of, including baby teeth and wisdom teeth. Crowded or crooked teeth had to be equally nonexistent and the slightest overlap or overbite eliminated the group from study.
Price discovered 14 groups of people with perfect teeth. They were of different races and from different environments. As he expected, the groups enjoyed perfect health, mentally and physically. Price studied their eating habits and found that the diets of these groups were equivalent. Some lived in the mountains and some at the sea, but the proportions and food groups were the same. The people even looked the same.
To quote from the Weston A. Price Foundation website at www.westonaprice.org: “Dr. Price’s research demonstrated that humans achieve perfect physical form and perfect health generation after generation only when they consume nutrient-dense whole foods and the vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.”
What I like about Price’s work is that the diet wasn’t fabricated out of “logic” or as an excuse to sell products. It was based on actual observations of real groups of people who enjoyed perfect health. The ideal human diet was a discovery, not an invention.
For nineteen years I’ve raised four kids on this organic whole foods, fat-generous diet and witnesses can attest that none of us have been sick (knock wood), and there exists no surplus fat among us. It’s economical, too, because there aren’t the cravings for expensive junk food and there is little need for medicine.
The book I recommend is “Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Fallon, published by the Weston Price Foundation. It contains an overview of Price’s research plus recipes on how to prepare delicious food in these traditional ways.
Of course, the body needs exercise, too. It’s been proven that a smoker who works-out regularly and strenuously has better health than a non-smoker who sits on his duff all day. That tells you something about the power of smoking. Oops, I mean exercise!
I’m going to throw out an idea to chew on: Why not make exercise one of the pillars of public education? How about four “R’s” instead than three? Readin’, Ritin’, ‘Rithmatic, and Runnin’. If intense, age-appropriate physical education started in kindergarten and continued through high school, not only would everyone think better, but we’d have conditioned a generation of life-long athletes. (I hear the groans of teenagers…. that’s because they haven’t been conditioned.)
Learning and discipline would be so much easier, I wager you could replace two hours of academics with two hours of athletic/dietary education and get higher academic test scores. (Now I hear adults groaning…..) There are charter schools for music, for the arts. I humbly dare a charter school to form based on food and athletics.
In next week’s column, I’ll continue with the rest of the human pyramid: the brain, the emotions, and our connection with mystery.
Happy New Year!
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November 23rd, 2005
Dear Straight Talk: I was out with a friend one night and we were drinking from the same container. Two days later she was diagnosed with mono. Does that mean I have mono, too? I’m afraid to ask my mom because she will think I was out fooling around. But, what if I have it? Isn’t it called the “kissing disease”?—Sweet 16
Dear Sweet 16: For something called the “kissing disease” you’d hope in the least for a little romance, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, you can get mono in the worst of slumps.
Infectious mononucleosis is a virus transmitted through saliva and mucus and it can be contracted by drinking out of the same container as an infected person, or through close encounters with one of their sneezes or coughs.
Once mono incubates, which takes a month or two, the most common symptoms (fever and swollen lymph glands in the neck) are easily confused with the flu. Though it’s not considered a serious illness, it can take two or three months for a full recovery.
The good news: mono is not highly contagious because most people have an immunity toward it. I won’t ask what was in that container you were drinking from, or why your mom thinks you were out “fooling around”, but since you know you were exposed, don’t fool around any longer. Tell your mom and your doctor.
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