Warped Standards

After perusing a recent issue of People in my chiropractor’s waiting room yesterday afternoon, I’m convinced that the magazine and pop culture is more vapid than ever.

According to People, Entertainment Weekly and a host of other periodicals and websites, there’s not much more to life than trying to stay young and sexy.

Anybody my age really doesn’t have much usefulness if I believe these purveyors of cultural standards. It’s even worse for women; life seems to be over by 40.

The celebrity mags and websites are full of “beautiful” people flaunting their surgically enhanced bodies on the beach and elsewhere. Such a depiction of life is deceiving. We all age. We gain weight. We get wrinkles. A woman’s value is not determined by the breast enlargements made at the hands of a plastic surgeon.

Eating Junk

I have mixed feelings about health care reform. I hate it when hardworking people aren’t provided with health insurance by their employers or it’s so costly that they can’t afford it themselves.

But I also hate it when people abuse the system and cause health care costs for the rest of us to escalate. These are the people who run to the doctor for every sniffle or ache.

Of course many of our health problems are self-imposed. Cigarette smokers tend to contract lung cancer, emphysema and related diseases more than the rest of us. And as study after study shows, http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090728/1aobesity28_st.art.htm
obesity in many people triggers preventable health problems, including stroke, diabetes and heart attacks.

I know junk food is less expensive, but in the long run it is costlier, both in terms of how it shortens the quality of life and the years of living. I’m always amazed at birthday breaks at work at how quickly doughnuts and potato chips are consumed in comparison to fresh fruit.

The other day I set out some raw cashews and filberts to share with my co-workers. One employee groused, “Where’s the taste?” I guess God didn’t get the memo that He needs to process the food for it to be palatable.

When it’s my turn to throw a birthday party I often provide refreshments made with God’s ingredients: a fruit salad. I’ve had co-workers ask me what a honeydew melon, papaya and apricot are. They had never seen or tasted them before. Once I had a co-worker ask what kind of artificial sweetener I used to make the fruit salad taste so great. He couldn’t believe that anything could taste so wonderful without chemicals.

Alas, if more of us ate God-given, non-processed foods, we would be a healthier nation not burdened with such high cost medical problems