Sample Chapters

These sections of chapters are samples, and are meant to give an example of the writing, without overwhelming readers with too much.

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 The Landscape of Learning

 

Greetings Friends,

 

I’m so glad you decided to come along on the journey, and I hope we will have many happy days together. Funnybone Kitchen offers a somewhat different experience compared to most health books, so I’d like to mention a few things to provide you with the maximum benefit. Before we get into things too far I want to offer an overall landscape view of the premises for this book. If you can summon up just a little patience to carry you through these first two short sections I think you’ll find that this book takes on more life with every chapter.

I know the world seems to be in a hurry and asks authors to get to the point instantly, but this book is not about instant cures. It assumes you are reasonably intelligent and can call upon your life experience and personal observations to make better decisions. So in addition to providing you with vital information, I’d like to offer you a little time and a plateful of ideas that you can adapt to your changing needs. I know this concept is a change from what health books usually contain, but over time, Americans have developed such unreasonable expectations about what can be done in a certain amount of time that I just can’t leave this state of affairs to go on any longer without saying a few words about it.

The entire world is now demanding instant results in one form or another, but the quick-fix and get-rich-quick schemes that America has bred into its people over the last half century have made us the kingdom of unrealistic thinkers, too many of whom don’t want to understand anything about the time it takes to accomplish something. Many millions of scams abound, not just in the health arenas like how to cure any cancer with one herb, how to lose all the weight you want fast and easy, how to quite smoking in ten minutes, but everywhere you look; how to write a book in 48 hours, how to buy a house with zero cash, how to master the guitar in 3 easy steps, how to paint beautiful portraits in 7 days, and how to make a million dollars in a month.

A gigantic series of books would be required to even begin to touch all the false promises made in American culture. It is reasonable enough to want an instant cure for a health condition, but to actually expect to get one is a sign of a culture devoid of practical considerations. There certainly is much magic in the world, but there are different kinds of magic. The magic of nature and all living beings is a wonder to behold, and it is available to all just by using your senses and imagination. However, when we have been under severe distress for a long time and have an affliction that needs help, we can’t just snap a finger to make us well. There is a powerful magic inside ourselves, but it has to have time to adjust itself to the demands that are placed upon it. The magic of learning and healing is as real as steel, but people need to realize that it is not something we can demand at the flip of a switch, and receive without spending any time or doing any work. This is the type of magic that has to be earned.

The overriding messages of this book were not written and shared to fill a trendy niche, but instead are built on the permanent realities of living. One of this book’s advantages is that it was written over a long period of time, as opposed to the vast majority which are tapped out in a year or two. During the over fifteen years that I worked on this book, what may be the greatest number of changes in the marketing of food, our eating behaviors, and the corporate interference of our health education has taken place. Granted, we have made progress in certain areas, but not, it seems, in ways that have kept us consistent. I have seen trends come and go, health information applauded then refuted, and health books run the gamut from the newest diet technology to stone-age ideologies. I think the fact that this book covers such a spectrum of time and living gives it a quality that most people have not seen before, and that they will appreciate.

We will be having some fun along the way, but don’t let negative words or an occasional rant discourage you. One thing I have learned over the years is that overflowing rivers of nothing but cheerful news—unrelieved by painful truths—is cause for immediate alarm. There’s no doubt that some of the subjects I cover will reveal distressing facts. But I hope that by doing so I’ll be able to curtail our detrimental behaviors, and ultimately, bring glimmers of hope and goodwill back to our health education. Unfortunately, covert activities that damage citizen health are still widespread, and usually the creation of positive change requires a keen sense of discernment and some uncomfortable trench work. As we all know, accidentally hitting your funnybone is a wake-up call, and makes you more aware of your surroundings. It allows you to be smarter in the future.

Prevention is a theme I will be reinforcing throughout this book, but I want to expand the term in a way that has not been done before. If we simply default to thinking about “prevention” as a way to avoid illness, it can set in motion thoughts, ideas, and expectations that can have negative effects if looked at only in that light. It may accidentally bend us to expect sickness, instead of reinforcing our natural urges to expect health. So whenever I mention the word prevention, I would ask you to expand your definition of it to include not just steering clear of the obviously foolish things we need to avoid, but also adding a solidifying reassurance of the body’s natural power to take care of itself. You must believe and expect that your body will use all of its resources, processes, and wisdom to your benefit, and not drag worries and fears onto your mental plate every day. Fear is the most primal of our emotions and it must be allowed to express itself, but it should never dominate any healing process. It can cause your mind to concentrate too much on bad things that might happen, instead of all the good things that your body has done, is doing, and will keep on doing to ensure your happiness. I beg you to keep this flexible interpretation foremost in your mind throughout the journey of this book, because it will give you the best chance of pleasure and longevity.

Sometimes my words may appear to be against all the dumb things we humans do, but the truth is, my own and nearly everyone else’s natural inclination is set up to work for positive changes, more than it is to try and fight against the forces that dampen our full development. There are nearly always better options than one-dimensional, head-on approaches. On the other hand, sometimes head-on approaches are the very best—indeed, the only way—that will result in adequate changes and solutions. Even if we sometimes fail to recognize the best approaches, it is more natural for the initiative inside us to be built on a positive foundation of believing in and working toward getting better, being wiser, and living happier through less stressful channels, than by the significantly more uncomfortable and dysfunctional methods which too many of us sometimes default on. I always try to do more than just voice complaints. I offer ways to do things better, because solutions require more than just bitching.

Some criticisms and conflicts are unavoidable, but creating solutions to our challenging problems requires that we use all available resources and knowledge. We must therefore be attentive so that the on-deck ballast in our boats doesn’t become so heavy with negativity that it keeps us from noticing that our crafts might tip. Our ships trust themselves to make the journey safely, and we have to trust their companions at the helm to not overburden them. As you read this book then, acknowledge and reinforce your positive direction often, and reorient yourself when necessary. Know that when your craft is in order, your sense of direction is intact, and you take joy in cooperating with others along the way, you can weather almost any storm.

 

  Propaganda Versus Education

 

We need to look at some of the driving forces that have manipulated our thinking, purchasing, eating, and medical habits, all of which have put Americans in a health decline for decades. We really don’t need any authorities to confirm this because it is easily verifiable from observations, but even the December 2008 issue of Time magazine ran a feature article called, “The Sorry State of American Health.” At least this is a relatively accurate assessment, yet we keep hearing widely varying counter-opinions, like the one I’ll mention by the Associated Press coming up. These contrary views are typical of the constant fits and starts of information we seem to be inundated with every week.

It has become obvious that the true health education of our population has beenexchangedpropaganda, and we have too often left the responsibilities of health to other “authorities,” instead of believing in our own intelligence and decisions. In spite of the tens of thousands of extensively trained medical doctors, corporate food scientists, and public educators, as well as local, state, and federal government agencies supposedly dedicated to the improvement of health, all of them combined have done virtually nothing to prevent the escalation of degenerative diseases.

Over a decade ago, back on Sept. 13, 2002, The Associated Press had a little blurb in a local newspaper about a new government health report. It said that they had “looked at health trends spanning the second half of the 20th century and found improvement on almost every measure.” It is easy to decode this kind of propaganda because the most cursory observation easily shows that the opposite is true. If we take just a few of the many ailments and diseases that have been killing us, we have all of the information we need. Millions of people in industrialized countries all around the world are dying from stranger and more numerous degenerative diseases each year. Even more importantly, they are occurring much earlier in life. Children are diagnosed with diseases that used to be common only amongst parents or grandparents. Obesity and Type-2 diabetes for children and adults have risen drastically in only three decades, and according to the medical industry’s own statistics, in the last 100 years we’ve had huge increases in heart disease and cancer. Excuse me, but these are not “improvements.” If we were really undergoing constant improvements, the health care industry would not be one of the fastest growing job sectors.

Propaganda is not education. Propaganda’s goal is to mislead people. It is easy to understand, therefore, why we are becoming sicker and why we need a completely new approach to health education. Although it’s true that technical advances can keep us alive longer once we have a threatening ailment, most people don’t realize how misleading our “longer average lifespan” really is. The so-called shorter lifespan of the past was because of infant and early childhood deaths, infections without quick care, and the knockout-punch diseases we now have medicines for. It’s not a fair comparison at all. Unfortunately, this length-of-life figure lulls us into lethargic living. We think we can rely on technology to feed and save us, but we have already seen the continually damaging results and the astronomical amount of money spent on even temporary symptom elimination. While the ever-increasing technology of medicine has undoubtedly had a positive influence in keeping people alive when they become sick, the careless half of science—the elaborate manufacturing of empty foods, additives, drugs, chemicals, and the other detrimental attributes of society—has been shown conclusively to undermine health.

Even with improvements in our information, our quest to change inadequate eating and living behaviors is only partly academic. True education is something different. It is carried out with children and human mentors in the kitchen, at the lake, or in the backyard. Don’t you remember your fieldtrips as a kid? You leapt for joy at leaving the stale school learning environment and plunged madly into the fires of true experience. You knew that you had the ability to learn anything and what you learned was much more than memorized data. You may not remember the room number your math class was taught in, but you did remember that a sunflower seed contains all the essential nourishment it needs to grow when you were touching one in Blue Mound State Park.            

We must recapture our vitality and health through nursing tomato plants, chasing frogs, frisky wrestling matches, or whatever it takes to restimulate ourselves. It’s better to brew a cup of rose hip tea and take your dog for a walk than to laboriously grunt with a gut-buster machine and swallow cans of some diet milkshake because prime-time TV says it will slim you down. Haven’t you ever wondered why so few tourists die on vacation? Because on vacation food is not just supper, it’s a fiesta. And exercise becomes mountain hikes. I don’t jog. It’s too boring. But I’ll chase a soccer ball down the street or ride my bike after mallards down to the Mississippi river. If we look for the best people and places and immerse ourselves in the religion of fun, then we are ready to fully experience life and improve our health, instead of just memorizing information. We must learn more by direct experience and become more versed in the fascinating study of epistemology—the hows and whys of learning what we know—because as Aldous Huxley once declared, “The nonverbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of our existence, are almost completely ignored.”

The business term of “Public Relations” is another form of propaganda that is intimately interwoven with our psyche, and we need to cast off its unholy influence as soon as possible. PR people think the masses these days are busy and cannot spare the time to study anything important to their lives. So they, the experts, have proclaimed themselves our saviors. The public relations worldview is quite simple: Most everyone is foolish and irrational, so they will show and tell us how things are and should be. They fill us in on all important matters including medicine, work-related injuries, food technology, and nuclear power. Government and industry barnstormers are brought in to hammer home the safety of products that the results show, kill us. According to PR people, everyone who is afraid or who questions their authority is a lunatic, a paranoid wall-banger with tendencies to overstate danger. They tell us that no, not really as many people are dead as the activists say.

It is time for us all to be aware that clever idiots shape citizen perceptions on everything from national health education curriculums to the rules of a teenage baseball game. Public Relations experts use information that, contrary to real scientific principles and experiments that can be duplicated, can never be proven wrong. This is the way their information is contrived and delivered. Public relations firms have been holding up the pillars of industry for a long time. Public relations specialists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber who authored the book Trust Us, We’re Experts!, make case after convincing case and tell us that, “The men engaged in industry, chemists, and engineers, take it as a matter of course that a little thing like industrial poisoning should not be allowed to stand in the way of a great industrial advance.”

These days many low quality innovations, and especially information technology, mask themselves as high-tech wonders. TV is a famous medium for transmitting this propaganda, but outreach covers the globe, including the Internet, movies, and the most obvious source, company advertising materials. Underground corporate people drive their advertising campaigns through subterranean channels and feel-good affiliations. Public TV is routinely “supported” by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, who put PR for their “Pfizer Kids” slogan right before Sesame Street. Elmo has his own junkfood chewies to get children started on their first addiction. Yet every year more and more people intuitively sense—and find out later—that the PR they are exposed to is not complete, accurate, or even within the realm of possibility.

An example of this is the increasing number of faked scientific research documents. In 1989 the U.S. government set up a program to uncover scientific misconduct, and since that time they have been getting busier. Even with a few dozen staff members they can't keep up. Only 23 cases were brought to conclusion in 2004, and only 8 were guilty of research fraud. With 274 complaints, the numbers were 50% higher in 2004 than the previous year. Although I certainly have complaints about the U.S. government, there are also good people doing things that are helpful, and that citizens appreciate. This is one of them.

Here are a few prime cases brought to our attention by AP national writer Martha Mendoza: Andrew Friedman, a surgeon and researcher for Brigham and Woman's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who made up data for top medical journals. He went on to become senior director of clinical research at McNeil Pharmaceutical. Eric Poehlman, a noted nutrition researcher, stole millions in federal grant money by falsifying data on hormone supplements, aging, and menopause as a professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Garry Kammer, a Lupus specialist from Wake Forrest University, forged family research to get cash from the National Institutes of Health. Ali Sultan from the Harvard School of Public Health also falsified research data to get grant money. Way back in 1974 William Summerlin, a Sloan-Kettering cancer researcher was caught coloring the fur on white mice with a black marker to justify his erroneous experiments. Now here’s a question: How many American teenagers even know that the government has a department to investigate scientific fraud? The number of days in a month is probably greater.

I cannot count the times I have surveyed people about the quality of some advertised product, and the only comment I could illicit was “I don't know about the product, but the special effects on the commercial were awesome, and the science behind it looks impressive.” In our modern age, quality is not the goal anymore, as can be seen by millions of customers who are forced to pay for high priced goods that utterly fail in quality. Real customer satisfaction means less each year, despite its prominent role in advertising. The surface value of high-tech persuasion is enough to sell consumer products, education, medicine, and food. The U.S. is becoming known as the land of trivial propaganda with a reliance on fluffy data, instead of substance, sincerity, and forethought. If you are apt to turn away at this assertion and proclaim it nonsense, please write and give me a couple of examples of industrial food or medical products or services that you feel are truthfully represented, devoid of dangers, of admirable quality, and worth what they cost. I've been asking the question for years but could fit all the responses I've gotten on a postcard.

Today's scientific research and PR taint everything from school news and health data to car buying trends and what clothes are in season. Products and services used to be driven by a company’s desire to make them safer and more innovative, but now these reasonable invitations are overcrusted with frosting that covers their absence. Not enough science is undertaken for the love of discovery anymore. The goal of high-tech research is to convince us to buy. Companies and organizations are unrelenting in their desire to project a glamorous image, and to create a need to keep us addicted. Instead of sharing universal truths, child rearing wisdom, or a gentle reminder to keep our heads, today's political and business climate is nauseatingly encapsulated in the creed of “It's not what is true, but what is believed.”

PR firms get doctors and industry experts to draft letters of recommendation or scientific opinion on various matters to bolster court cases, fold into advertising, or use in a thousand other ways that we are not even aware of. They are well paid. Experts come on TV as supposedly unbiased outsiders. The evening news programs are frequently composed of expensive video clips designed and made available by gigantic public relations firms. They have perfected ways to sell their points of view and products yet make it seem as if a completely neutral institution or person is dispensing the information. The news people are too invested to even tell us, as they could do by putting a small box at the bottom of the screen that says “Video provided by the XYZ Company.” And worse, media, newspaper, and information conglomerates are now being merged into huge behemoths at an alarming rate, which further centralizes and marginalizes information, instead of giving the public a broad, objective view of issues. Certainly the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that is supposed to regulate advertising could do a more thorough job of protecting public health, because too much health is ruined by manipulative PR and advertising, through both public and commercial TV.

The Award-winning magazine The Sun quotes John Stauber in an interview fourteen years ago in the March 1999 issue:

 

Corporations want us to believe that they are concerned, moral “corporate citizens”—whatever that means. So businesses pump millions of dollars into charities and nonprofit organizations to deceive us into thinking that they care and are making things better.... The P.R. industry just might be the single most powerful political institution in the world. It expropriates and exploits the demographic rights of millions on behalf of big business by fooling the public about the issues.

 

Even the New England Journal of Medicine has published articles by people caught in misrepresentations, and every branch of medicine has its own specific marketing angles, manipulations, and cover-ups. In 1997 a conflict of interest came about when a doctor wrote a scathing review of Sandra Steingraber’s book Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks At Cancer and the Environment. Jerry H. Berke, M.D., as he identified himself for the review, did not disclose that he was an employee—was in fact the director of toxicology—at W.R Grace, a well-known polluter and one of world’s biggest chemical manufacturers. But for every one who gets caught, many more slip by. Their secret is invisibility and cover up. This of course has always happened in business and with governments, and it’s not far off base for me to state the comment I heard one day on the radio, when speaker said, “Ninety percent of history is classified.”

Corporate funding for pseudo-scientific research is increasing each year, and it has also come to dominate academic thinking and behavior at major universities all over the world. Conservative think tanks, foundations, and other spoof-named organizations are created as front groups for corporations and their ulterior motives. Whenever you join or support an organization of any kind ask for a list of all donors and find out how much they are giving. Ask for a list of affiliations for people on the board. Do not just assume that because the name of the organization sounds as if it promotes public health, that it actually does so. We must get better at reading between the lines, and see propaganda and public relations for what they are. In any form, they are causing harm, and we have an obligation to our children and all future generations to expose the damage they are causing.

 

 

Fat and Oil Fear

 

We start cracking the code to sensible nutrition when we begin to explore the polyunsaturated fatty acids, two of which are essential fats. Pioneers in the field of essential fats and oils research such as Joanna Budwig in the 1950s, and Udo Erasmus in this generation, have shown that the ingestion of fresh, raw plant seed oils that contain the two essential fatty acids (EFAs), linoleic acid (LA) and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), are essential to health. This unsaturated and superunsaturated status make the essential fatty acids important because of the negative charge they carry, and because of the bends at the bonds that make them less clottable than saturated fatty acids. They also have low melting points, which means they remain liquid at body temperature. Flax oil is loaded with more omega-3 ALA than any other seed. Omega-6 sunflower, safflower, and sesame seed oils are sources of LA, and hemp seeds contain a decent mixture of both.

Other interesting fat molecules called phospholipids are also crucial to body functions. Instead of being just oil-soluble like triglycerides, they are also water-soluble, and that makes them astounding molecules. Phospholipids are cellular guardians and membranes that determine what goes in and out of our cells. They keep the solutions of fats, oils, water, and chemicals correct. Lecithin gets some press these days and is a strand of phospholipid. It supplies choline, an important chemical, and is also composed of about one half essential fatty acids. Lecithin, a constituent of bile, which is made by our livers, helps emulsify and break down fats so they can be more easily digested. It can also be purchased in supplement form. I prefer sunflower lecithin, and I add it to foods to ensure proper fat digestion and to assist with the chemical transformations that the body requires for its intricate essential fatty acid operations.

There are many conversion fats the body makes out of its essential fats, if it has fresh essential fats to work with. These derivative fatty acids are important to optimal body functioning. A few people have biochemical hindrances in their bodies that prevent them from making enough derivatives, but if a person has an optimum diet, they can assume they are making all the derivatives they need unless they show deficiency symptoms. Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are the two most commonly-known derivative fatty acids formed from the essential fat ALA. Omega-3 plant oils are the only ones that our bodies can make EPA and DHA from. EPA and DHA are commonly sold as “fish oils,” and are the fatty acids found in northern cold-water fish like sardines, mackerel, and salmon. Our body will make EPA from DHA. Just like their parent essential fats, EPA and DHA are important for brain, eye, nerve, and heart building and functioning. They have many other specialized healthy properties that no sane person should deny themselves.

Many people get their EPA and DHA from fish oils, but the processing with high heat and other chemicals to purify them can ruin the oils. In the last several years good scientists have found a way to get important DHA from algae, which makes it the preferred plant source. This is because it is not subject to the toxics which many fish accumulate, and it’s a renewable resource, which does not require killing and depletion of the already low fish stocks in many areas. Krill oil is considered a reasonable source of EPA and DHA. Since they are small and at the bottom of the food chain, Krill accumulate virtually no toxins, and since their total biomass is gigantic they do not deplete ocean life as radically as other more scarce fish sources. The best supplements of krill also have a unique lipid profile and an antioxidant component, so they are absorbed better and do not go rancid as fast as many fish oils. The knock on krill is that a fair number of people object to the taste. 

Gamma linolenic acid (GLA) is another derivative fatty acid made from the Omega-6 essential fat LA. It is important that your body has an optimal amount of this specialized fat too. Like all the other derivatives, it will be made if the body has the essential plant fat that it is made from. The most common plants that contain GLA are evening primrose, black current seed, and once again algae, which are all the preferred sources of this oil. We need more research to understand these complex derivative fatty acid activities and deficiencies, but we don’t need any to tell us that we rarely eat essential fats so the body can make its important derivatives. The next time you hear an uninformed person talk about low-fat or reduced-fat diets, remember the things that healthy fats do for us, and observe that hardly any people talk about or eat them.

Good fats work hand in hand with proteins to keep our tissues strong, including in the vascular system. The extra protein we eat may not even be available if we are not getting any EFAs. And only a small amount of protein will go a long way with unsaturated allies. Fresh plant oils and their derivatives help everything from rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and cancers of the pancreas, colon, lung, and breast, to chronic inflammation, blood blockages, depression, sleep disorders, and learning disabilities. They are important to hair, skin, and nail development, and all other body functions. For the last 50 years we have eaten less and less good fat—and every year we have more obesity and degenerative disease. Will somebody please do the math on that?

Some of the worst fats, and they are not even real fats anymore, are partially hydrogenated oils. Partial hydrogenation creates trans-fatty acids. They are unnatural fatty acids that have double bonds on the opposite sides of the molecular chain. This is in direct contrast to the original configuration that has double bonds on the same side of the chain. These fatty acids are disastrous, because when introduced into the body their distorted shapes and movements change the permeability of cell membranes, and impair the ability of cells to transport nutrients and conduct proper electrical activity. Partially hydrogenated oils are in all kinds of processed and snack foods. Read the labels, please.

Trans-fatty acids are also produced by heating oils or fats to temperatures above 160 degrees for even short times, such as ten minutes. Restaurants heat oils at 350 degrees all day long. Various marketing gimmicks are used by the food industries to promote themselves as oil connoisseurs, but most of them are way off base. Even snack chips these days, made with supposedly good oils and organic grains as they state on the label, are ruined when fried. Others eliminate all oil, in pasta sauce for example. It makes the sauce healthier than it would be if they used refined oils, but also implies that all oils and fats are bad. Don’t be fooled by claims made by grocery stores which sell oils that are “high in polyunsaturates.” Get specifics. 

The reality is that there is absolutely no control over what types of bad fat by-products the original oils will be converted into once they are partially hydrogenated, overheated, or otherwise messed with. Udo Erasmus in his comprehensive book, Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill, quotes what G.J. Brisson, a professor at Laval University in Quebec, said about trans-fats: “It would be practically impossible to predict with accuracy either the nature or content of these new molecules.” Then Udo lays it out in crystal clear terms: “Since trans-fatty acids have detrimental effects on our cardiovascular system, immune system, reproductive system, energy metabolism, fat and essential fatty acid metabolism, liver function, and cell membranes, we should consider margarines, shortening oils, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils to be harmful to human health!” There was such an outcry when Europe learned of this unhealthy processing years ago that the Dutch government moved swiftly to ban the use of trans-fats.

Now I need to mention one last thing that hardly ever gets any press and that most people are not even aware of. As bad as trans-fats are, there are many other compounds made by the oxidation and heating of frying oils that can be even worse. We are hearing about products made without trans-fats now, but as with so many foods which are complex and can be ruined in so many ways, fats and oils are probably the most dangerous of any food when chemically changed by high heat. We are still in the infancy of learning how many dangerous polymer and other breakdown compounds are created by the intense heat of frying oils, much less being able to test them or conduct long-range human studies. Do not fall for the “no trans-fats” ploy on its own. If oils are processed or used in frying, especially at high temperatures for lengths of time—like all frying oils in restaurants—they will be transformed into uncountable other nasty substances that the body can not identify or use, let alone be able to rid itself of without grave consequences along the way. There is a direct and irrefutable parallel to the amount of altered fats we ingest with the number of diseases we suffer from, especially heart disease and cancer.

After cutting out the ruined and bad fats, turn over a new leaf in your life by adding good oils to your diet to make sure you get enough of everything you need. Plant oils like flax, sunflower, safflower, and hemp, or optimum blends are the best way to get our essential fats and derivatives. This is one area that should never be compromised, and we should not use anything but the highest quality oils. They are broken down quickly and degraded by heat, sunlight, and oxygen. All the studies that have shown how bad omega 6 oils are have not used raw, organic, and properly bottled oils, and they have not been used in the proper ratios with other complementary oils. Fresh seed oils need to be expeller-pressed under low heat, and stored in brown glass bottles with the dates of manufacture clearly stamped on the label. If you get them this way you can freeze a bottle or two and defrost it later. Except for virgin or extra virgin olive oil, if the oils you buy come packaged in clear bottles, don’t buy them. Extra-virgin olive oils, though they have low concentrations of essential fatty acids, are the only oils you can buy in a typical supermarket that are healthful, but not in excess. You can purchase these in clear bottles because they don’t break down and go rancid. Buy organic. These oils lower blood pressure, protect cell membranes, stimulate enzyme production in the pancreas, and have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

It is imperative that all the vegetable oils you eat be non-GMO, fresh, organic, and of the highest quality. If you skimp the same oils become dangerous. I use a number of exquisite oils from Flora because they are some of the very best anywhere. Except for the GLA oils, which are very difficult to find in anything but capsules, it makes little sense to purchase plant oils in capsules because encapsulation can double or quadruple the cost for the same amount of oil. The best one I’ve found is Udo’s DHA Omega 3, 6, 9 blend. It’s got virtually everything you could need in an optimum mix, it tastes good, and it’s easy to use. I add it to steamed veggies, soups, sauces, stews, pasta dishes, salads, cole slaw, corn on the cob, and dozens more foods. My new favorite thing is to put it on mashed potatoes. It’s all good.

Although they do not contain as perfect a fatty acid profile and ratio as the DHA 3, 6, 9 blend made specifically for that purpose, things like almond, hemp, walnut, and pumpkin seed oils are also great to use for their important fats and other nutrients, and because their delicate taste sensations are fun to experiment with. So play with them on a sunny Sunday afternoon. In addition to bottled oils, don’t forget to eat the fresh, organic, seeds that these oils come from—preferably sprouted—because they contain many superb minor nutrients. Ground flax seeds in particular offer good soluble and insoluble fiber, and lignans that promote beneficial bowel bacteria. They are anti-fungal and anti-viral, remove cholesterol, and fight cancer. I get my essential oils from both seeds, nuts, and bottled oils, and I alternate them as the whim hits.

Whole, raw fish filets can be used to supplement yourself with EPA and DHA if you want to use fish sources for these fatty acids, but they contain little of the EPA or DHA you think you’re getting if the skin is cut off. If you want the good oils in fresh fish, then bake, boil, or steam them for only a short time. Eat the skin, or at least scrape it, because the super-oils are directly underneath. Cut, molded, processed, flaked, skinless, battered, deep fried and partially hydrogenated fish from the store is just plain bad. Remember, pond-raised fish are common and may be polluted. Wild fish are much better. Don’t trust product information black holes. Find out exactly where your fish comes from.

The right fats and oils are essential to every process of life, but you don’t need to overdose. Small amounts taken regularly will cover your needs. When we supplement our diets with fresh unadulterated oils, seeds, and nuts, the lack of which has been causing us problems for years, we give the body what it needs to thrive. Fats and oils are so important that they should be taught in every school curriculum, but never are. Despite all this correct, relevant, and current information, we still hear the low-fat dogma being preached by the media, doctors, and many other people. We therefore need to teach ourselves and our children about this subject, because modern health education has almost completely ignored it.

It is amazing how many parents I’ve seen give their children fish oils religiously, but never have any other quality oils in their homes, and never find ways to work them into their children’s diets. People need to be more imaginative with their palates and culinary arts. When was the last time you went to a dinner party, picnic, or anywhere else, and found out that someone had added good oils to the meal—and told you about it—or at least offered them to you as a supercharged condiment? Rarely indeed. So instead of remaining just a regular chef, make yourself known as the first one in your neighborhood to add these nutritious delicacies to favorite recipes. Who knows what new friends you’ll make, or what unfulfilled potential gently sleeps behind that one special smile?

 

The Celebration Place

 

Although there is no easy way to prove it, I am positive that the loss of time spent in our kitchens is another one of the mysterious factors that promotes illness. But really, it’s not so mysterious after all. One can easily draw certain inferences about modern life, and even if we are not right in every case, such examples have more than enough merit to consider, as long as we look at them without closed eyes. In short, we must remain connected to our kitchens to retain a basic foundation and trust in life. A certain insecurity is instilled, especially in children, who simply push microwave buttons or tear the foil off TV dinners. It holds kids back from confidence in the world. Deep down they know they really don’t know what’s going on, or how the most basic processes of living are connected to them. It’s time to change that.

Another thing too few health food books talk about are the kitchen accessories like dishes that we have forgotten to connect with our overall nutrition landscape. The dishes that we use, the magic vessels that we cook, serve, and eat our food in, should be thought of with more respect. That means that we shouldn’t just slurp out of old plastic beer cups. Instead, use a custom-designed pottery mug crafted on your birthday, and made with your own secret insignia or flagship emblem. Why? Because food is not a mere lump of stuff. It’s very essence and energy makes our lives worthwhile. We need to demand a certain amount of aura and personality in our food vessels. The life we are putting into our bodies must be stored, transferred, and put into our mouths in containers we really like the look and feel of, and that tell us important stories about where we came from, who we are, and where we dream of going. We should learn to love caressing and washing these vessels. They are an important connection point for energy and happiness in our lives, and we need to treat them with as much sensual care as they give back by feeding us. Automatic dishwashers are nothing but an irritating waste of space and money. You have to three-quarter wash the dishes anyway, and the stench of the chemicals pollutes the entire house for hours. The soap is toxic, and even the most expensive machines leave a horrible-tasting soap film on the dishes. Use your hands to wash dishes.

Barter for beautiful ceramic plates and mugs at the art fair. But ask what kind of glazing they use and make sure they have details about it. Get that expensive set you want for your wedding—even though you’re still single. Hardwood spoons and utensils are better than metals and plastic. Leave yourself enough room for lots of variety to fit that special mood or occasion, or just to reduce boredom. Don’t get rusty old silverware or broken Tupperware at the Salvation Army store. The best drinking vessels, plates, bowls, and cooking pots to use are glass. Pyrex glass is needed for anything being heated, either in oven or on the stovetop. They don’t leech metal residues or tastes, and are regal to handle under any circumstance. Make your meals and snacks mean something, and give them a decent wardrobe. Make sure all your dishes are personal, colorful, and durable, and help them to appear as soon as possible. Having said that, one must also be content without a household full of expensive china. If you get at least a few nice mugs, plates, and bowls, that will be a good start, and you will begin to understand the philosophy that I’m warming you up to.

We need to make our funnybone kitchens functional places to eat, sew, make love, daydream, or play chess in. Anyone interested in health must carefully rummage through their kitchen and donate all unnatural groceries to the local food shelf. Dump the frosting mixes, refined cooking oils, cans of stew, and other items. It will take a while to clean up your kitchen, possibly several weeks. You must have enough of the good food around or you’ll be tempted to eat poorly, or eat out more often than you should. You must put all good food, herbs, spices, and cooking condiments such as kelp, garlic, and sweet basil, where you can see and get at them easily. They must be within reach, preferably right on a shelf next to your stove where you can add them to your meals, or on your kitchen table. Keep good food and quality oils in your refrigerator, not in order of taste, but importance. Buy some nice glass jars for the counter, and fill them with red lentils, black and navy beans, garbanzos, veggie pasta, wild rice, oats, and dried peppers. Make your kitchen a real eye treat.

 A nut grinder is helpful to have around, and a blender is great for many things including making salsa and churning up fruit drinks. Crockpots bubble up enticing entrees. Obtain a large vegetable steamer and get your paws on a good garlic press. Obtain Pyrex stovetop pans—without the easy-clean coating—and a wok. Sharpen all your knives and splurge on a good teapot, a beater for whipping, and a wide four-slice toaster for bagels. String up dried flowers and herbs from the cabinets or rafters, and wire up stereo speakers on top of the cupboards. You should be singing and playing in your kitchen like Sinatra at the Sands.

There is a healing radiance in your kitchen that you must begin to recognize and cultivate, and it is not just because food is served there. You must think of your kitchen as the nucleus of your energy source. This is why it is crucial to make your kitchen an interesting place to be, instead of a sterilized and shiny little museum where you can see no food, books, Dar Williams CDs, comfortable chairs, hanging flowers, growing radish sprouts, or hand-blown glassware. You want it to be the largest, most revered, fun, and comfortable room in your home. You want to be able to spend entire blocks of time there, and not be impelled to do everything at a pace that mimics a fast food drive-through. We simply must slow down, and begin to enjoy this hub of nourishment again. After all, when you get stressed out and want to renew your health with a holiday, you don’t run to the nearest travel agent and blurt out, “What’s the quickest vacation you’ve got!” You want a novel, a split coconut with a straw, and hammock on a beach. For that matter, knock out a wall, expand your kitchen, and install a hammock there. In short, make your kitchen the celebration place, and you’ll wonder how you went so long trying to nurture yourself and your family without such an exalted and colorful place to rest and grow. 

 

Reclaiming Our Learning and Good Decisions

 

Now we get a chance to talk more about two prominent themes I have been reinforcing throughout this book: reclaiming our learning and making good decisions. We have unmasked a lot of absurdities about our modern health education, and now we get a chance to add to what we have learned.

The best place to ground your learning is inside yourself first. Documented and emerging evidence indicates that people who take a significant part in understanding their own health often see more favorable and lasting results. People who don’t know—or don’t want to know—anything about their own bodies are often the ones who suffer most from illness. One friend exemplified this when she complained of carpal tunnel and wrist pain. After questioning her one evening about the possible cause or what muscles might be involved, she turned away exasperated and said, “I don’t want to know what it is, I just want it gone.” I’ve caught myself saying similar things. But I’ve also learned over time to apply countermeasures to make sure that every day I learn more about myself.

Because I was raised by a single mother, I have not spoken about my father, Eugene Francis McDaniel yet. But I want to mention him now because I often think of him when I think of hardscrabble learning. He certainly did things that any wife would justifiably have divorced him for, but we need not go into those now. Since my parents divorced when I was so young, and he was not around much after that, I don’t have an abundance of memories from him. But the ones that do I have are good. I wish that my father might have done more for me in this area, or at least for my mom. But I have always thought it better to withhold a harsh judgment of him because I sense that compared to the fortunate life I had as a child, his was radically more difficult, and it no doubt had a large influence on his adult behavior. In the end, I think that all boys have a natural affinity and need for their fathers, and it has never a seemed a burden to me to learn directly from the world, as he no doubt had to. Maybe that is something that came through my father to me. All fathers, as well as mothers, have more good things in their hearts that they wish they could have done and said to their children. So I hang onto the thought that whatever good I end up doing in the world was some little part of him, and it has been enough to carry me through some rough days. 

Another part of the practical education I have been talking about in this book is being able to make more subtle and rational observations and decisions in what we perceive is educating our children and ourselves. Throughout this book I ask you to use your inner resources to make decisions that prevent diseases like cancer from destroying your family. All the information I have provided you with has been taken from lengthy, numerous, and authoritative sources, and should be more than enough to instill a wide appreciation of the issues we have been discussing. I’m sure a few people will complain about me not showing footnotes for every study, article, or quote referenced, but if someone wanted to check scientific details on even one book I list in the bibliography, all they need to do is buy it—then take a few years off to begin research. If a person had an enormous amount of free time to kill, they could dive into massive mountains of data to research, cross-reference, and triple check every health subject imaginable. What they would find is that most articles, reports, books, and studies fan out into hundreds more in a juggernaut of scientific data, each of which is backed by dozens of scientists and doctors, and many of which contain at least a few—and sometimes many—inconsistencies. What this says is that scientists, doctors, and experts can disagree, even though they all supposedly “know.”

Science and technology fail us in the sense that we believe in their absolute invincibility over our own innate wisdom, which is often just as accurate as anything science says, if not more. When senses are combined with our own studies, observations, and experiences, along with people we know and trust as friends and possibly even specialists in some area, that is more than adequate to make good decisions. We need to stop giving our authority away, use what we have learned, and retain the integrity we have earned. There is something to be said for emptying our minds each night at bedtime, so the next day we can start fresh without the accumulated informational garbage and distractions of years bogging us down. As the sages have said, if our cups are never emptied, it’s harder to recognize and bring home the new wisdom that is looking for a home. 

People are always looking for the one ultimate answer, but we have mistakenly decided to rely—even if there were only one answer—on the new scientific one. Unfortunately, even the best scientists run and hide when new medicines kill patients, high-tech construction projects collapse, safe chemicals are found to be deadly, smart bombs explode too soon, or sophisticated telescopes fail, all of which have been created with “proven science.” On the other hand, we have Mayan monuments still standing even though they had no electronic calculators for engineering; babies are conceived without experts at the bedside explaining the mechanics of reproduction; people forgive each other without expensive psychoanalyses; countless families eat breakfast without scientists sitting at the table testing the food; billions of people are involved in life-enhancing religious ceremonies; and children are still put to sleep with lullabies having no scientific verification.

When I have occasionally asked my critics why the flowers grow tall and beautiful, and why the breezes turn warm in spring, they have invariably answered that seasonal change is caused by the sun. Yet when I inquired if they were solar or photosynthesis experts, they said no, and were scientifically unable to prove it. When I asked them if they believed in love or had ever felt its uncompromising security, they said yes, but were scientifically unable to prove it. In the case of all the information showing the direct and indirect causes for illness from our psychological manipulation and the intake of foods, drinks, drugs, and chemicals we are exposed to, we are always being turned away from making better decisions. We are told by various food and industrial scientists that what they have done has caused no harm. But degenerative diseases including diabetes, cancer, and heart disease have all skyrocketed in an irrefutable parallel with our sordid consumables, so we have to use our common sense and judgment in more accurate ways to refute misleading claims and steer ourselves away from trouble. Evidence does not have to be scientifically proven in a laboratory to be valid.

Here’s another way to look at it: If there was a steep, icy, mountain road with hairpin turns and no guardrails, and cars were constantly being found smashed to smithereens at the bottom of the cliff, you would not need a team of scientists to tell you why the cars crashed. If you see a small, insect-like creature that has eight legs, crawls on a web of silk, and catches bugs in it’s web...it’s a spider. For too many years doctors, scientists, and PR wizards have told people with the greatest authority that they are not qualified to identify spiders, or make informed decisions about their own health. In Dr. Victor Frankl’s holocaust memoir, Man’s Search For Meaning, he tells us, “This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events, but of personal experiences.... Here, facts will be significant only as far as they are a part of man’s experiences.” Simply put, the basis of our experiences do not, and never will, require the kind of intense scientific verification that modern bureaucrats tell us we need, especially when almost any important decision for living can be made without it.

In America, where ruinous health habits are created and promoted by technology, common sense or emotional attitudes—prompted with good reason—are thrown overboard as useless ballast. The separation language of science has been instrumental in America’s health decline. In one of Farley Mowat’s excellent books, Rescue the Earth!, Dr. David Suzuki, who began as the ultimate scientist—a geneticist—freely admits, “I have essentially walked away from my scientific colleagues. That’s been painful. But I had to do it.... I have come to appreciate the limitations of science and the arrogance that comes with it. It is an arrogance that comes from the intellectual insights we gain, which seem to give us such power but are actually restrictive.” Scientific facts do not always tell the truth, but sometimes they do, so we must nurture and build our instincts for discernment.

In the good book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), authors Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson show conclusively through many studies and examples how humans have always tried to justify their own errors, beliefs, and activities. And no other group of people can be as stubborn to rectify their wayward disasters than scientists. This is especially true if they are entrenched within supposedly impregnable institutions which make it a moral and often punishable crime to say anything that might threaten them or the golden orb of colleagues within their own or similar institutions. Many of these people did not start out with such a bulldog tenacity to hold onto their beliefs. But over time, with many influential people giving weight to the mistaken creeds they have been influenced by, they gradually find it difficult to change their minds—no matter how much damage they are causing. This need to reduce cognitive dissonance between what they are doing and the need to feel good about their work is employed in many ways. Tavris and Aronson sum it up well when they say: “The trouble is that once people develop an implicit theory, the confirmation bias kicks in, and they stop seeing evidence that doesn’t fit it…When experts are wrong, the centerpiece of their professional identity is threatened. Therefore… the more self-confident and famous they are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.”

It is possible to appreciate and use science while still acknowledging its limitations, and the disasters being promoted by our food and medical industries clearly show how many problems are being shoved under the rug by people too invested in their own theories to change. Robert Costanza, past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, tells us how unwilling scientific communities of the modern era are to accept technological and scientific failures, even when there are truckloads of examples that show how off course they are. “Scientific paradigms change,” Robert says with regret, “one funeral at a time.”

Fortunately, we all have within us the power to recognize and change our life and override the negative messages that make us eat and act foolishly. We’ve already had the premonition that this needs to be done. We must acknowledge this sixth sense that speaks to us often, and use it for changing ourselves, as humans have done all through time. Over the course of history there have been innumerable tales from sailors, grandmothers, soldiers, farmers, arctic explorers, children, and multitudes of ordinary people telling of unusual occurrences, visionary quests, a path home, or impending danger. Their stories would fill entire libraries. A vast quantity of material exists in every language, culture, and location on earth to show that humans are capable of tuning into subtle messages, making correct judgments, and taking action to ensure their survival. Jim Corbett, who in the first part of the twentieth century, saved hundreds of lives—indeed whole villages—in the remote northern foothills of India, sets down his tense account of intuition in The Temple Tiger, and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon:

Light was coming in the east, for the boles of the trees were beginning to cast vague shadows, and then the moon rose, flooding the open paths of the jungle with light. It was then that the tiger came. I could not see him, but I knew he had come, for I could feel and sense his presence.... Then as I turned my head to the right, to look behind, I saw the tiger. He was sitting on his hunkers in a patch of moonlight, facing the kill, with his head turned looking up at me.

The modern scientist may scoff at the validity of an inner voice, and discount any benefit it supposedly had in the foothills of the Himalayas, but inner voices, especially when combined with broad experience, are the most useful tools we possess. Back in that forest a statistician would have been woefully ill-equipped to walk any stretch of those jungles, and in all likelihood, would never have lived long enough to deliver his data showing that no tigers resided in that area. There are a thousand ways each of us makes major and minor decisions in our lives, most of which have little to do with scientific statistics. It is disheartening to realize that even people who should know better have accidentally become proponents of only “new” information, and tossed away traditional and innate wisdom as obsolete. This false perception has been slowly imprinted into the minds of many people, and is used as a marketing crutch by a conglomeration of industries to ensure that the public always feels inadequate, and need the latest expert’s advice.

Just one example of how inadequate our official education has been can be seen in something like stop-smoking programs. There are good tips for quitting in all the programs, but they only scratch the surface of things that run much deeper. It is insane that nobody has even considered acknowledging the latent biological, cultural, and social need we all have for fire and smoke. The historical origins and the allure of food, light, and warmth, are extremely compelling, and these are reasons that people are attracted to it. We cannot always overcome these factors from just an informational standpoint. It is exceeding foolish that the so-called experts don’t explore and discuss these very sane and needed compulsions, and alleviate some of the worry and burdens from people instead of just saying so and so didn’t have the will power. My suggestions would include having a backyard fire several times a week, buying more candles, creating little rituals of our own, having a little oil lamp for reading, and getting a little sweet grass, sage, or something to burn a puff of every so often. Smoke and fire are metaphoric magic, and they have been universal needs, desires, and entertainments of people everywhere forever. That’s partly why people smoke. Smoking programs have never addressed any of these issues and found a way to keep the energy and fire of life burning, while discarding the negative aspects of it. 

On food again, we continue to look to our new sciences even though they are harmful. We keep being told we can eat whatever destructive foods we want, and there will always be a new miracle cure from science to counteract our foolishness. Here is the introduction to the “Fat No More” article from the May 20th, 2004, Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Oh, to be a mouse, at the M.D. Anderson cancer center in Houston. You could spend six months eating the equivalent of a pizza and cheeseburger diet, ballooning to twice your normal weight. And then, with just four weeks of injections, you return to your lean self, without notable side effects—or any need to change your eating habits.” For how many decades now the gospel of avoiding obesity has been preached to us, and then less than a year after the Houston research, a new article appeared in the April, 20, 2005, Saint Paul Pioneer Press by Gina Kolata of the New York Times. Its revelatory title: “Extra Pounds May be Good For You.” It starts out, “People who are overweight have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight, federal researchers are reporting today in an unexpected outcome of the newest and most comprehensive study of the impact of obesity.”

Every year we have more examples of this kind of counterproductive garbage research, and the consequent distractions that endlessly complicate our decisions and whitewash the truth that we are getting fatter and sicker. We don’t need another universe of scientific data. We don’t need new computer software and other complicated equipment to dilute, manipulate, and baby-sit all this information. The truth is, anything helpful which is buried that deeply and subject to that many problems and self-serving intermediaries is so hard to find, sort out, and understand, that it makes it practically impossible to use. Again we are faced with the same fact that I stated in the first pages of this book and have mentioned numerous times: Every year we are force-fed more scientific information, and every year we have increases in the numbers of preventable degenerative diseases. Every year we have better technology, and every year we fail to use it in the most appropriate ways. American technocrats seem utterly blind to how much their haphazard experiments have eroded citizen confidence in science. As a result, we common people are learning to comprehend science more clearly and make better decisions regarding its use for our health—and we are doing this on our own, without their help.

For uncounted generations our ancestors were teaching their children and communities about life and being quite successful at it—without microscopes, research reports, or dull government officials. Kids were taught the love of life through keen observation and handed down wisdom from the life-long learning of their forefathers. Yes, they had their problems and made mistakes too, but overall they were much less foolish about the basic living principles like eating than we are. The true utopia of education is being grounded in its participation with all we have, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Although it is good to explore topics in depth and uncover previously unthought-of dimensions for nearly any subject, it seems inconceivable that we would need many thousands of books on things like eating, loving, talking, and walking. These, apparently, are all things we could never do ourselves without teams of scientific experts relinquishing their latest officially-sanctioned guidelines.

Since so many of society’s problems are interwoven together, they should be addressed together whenever possible. And because so many large problems have been detrimentally affecting our health for so long, we can certainly and finally acknowledge that what we have mistakenly called “getting educated” through mere information is totally inadequate. There are too few health book authors that have actively and consistently encouraged the observation and interaction that I have repeatedly brought into Funnybone Kitchen, because they have defaulted on the false notion that information by itself can transform people. Although information sharing can be a good warm-up or even used as a solid resource, by itself it can never create the long-term changes that our culture requires.

 

It’s Not a Perfect World

 

The sheer endurance of mothers like mine to survive and to continue to lead by example into an unsure future is the greatest gift we as humans could possibly be graced with. If we would only acknowledge their sacrifices and learn to use what they so unselfishly share with us, we could all tap into that magic rejuvenative power in life that is malleable, available, and that longs to be used for our benefit. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, usually at what I perceive are uncongenial circumstances that appear out of nowhere, I try not to live so far in the past or the future. All I really have are 24 hours at a time, no matter how much I get mentally or emotionally stretched out. When things become difficult, or even unbearable, if I can hang on for just a few more hours, I will be allowed a night of rest to see what the morrow brings. And surprisingly, that is all that is usually needed. The power of life to adapt and hope inevitably allows bad days to be followed by better ones.

By the time most of us reach the age of 40, we’ve been to a few funerals, some for close friends or family members. We ourselves have usually been involved in some way with catastrophe, often several times. As anyone who has been traumatized, sick, or on the edge of death with angelic nurses catering to every need can tell you, life in the real world with humans can be a rather messy affair. The experience of accidents, disease, and sickness, however, is an important and overlooked part of living, because when life becomes fragile and sweet, the unique human qualities of compassion, resignation, and forgiveness often arise. The late philosopher Alan Watts said in his book The Wisdom of Insecurity that “It must be obvious from the start that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity...we know that worrying is futile, but we go on doing it because calling it futile does not stop it.” Even in this seeming state of perpetual flux, if we looked at our lives closely, we would see that yes, there are dangers, but the world is not out to get us. It is here to nurture us. Does not the forest love its jaguars and the sea love its dolphins?

Life Itself, the endless beauty of the cosmos, is actually the most secure reality of all. We can know that even though earthly existence has always been troubled, things will eventually work out.  I sometimes think of life in terms of the old anonymous parable: “In the end, all will be well. If all is not well, then it is not the end.” By all means make yourself feel safe and secure, but if you do not have a lot of options, do it in a way that has more to do with your heart and peace-of-mind than the numbers on your calculator. Living life with corrupt relations, hobbling with canes, with a sprained wrist, or being flat broke are not really that bad—when you consider the options of not having been born, or of dying. After all, imperfection and mishap bind you to a good group of people, the rest of humanity. Luckily, most of us have ample compensation for our bad times in the form of many glorious rainstorms, kindnesses, and if we are lucky, waking up with a companion nuzzling next to us.

Before my Rollfast bicycle and I were plastered into the asphalt on my newspaper route on that dark misty morning when I was a boy, I used to ride it over to my grandmother’s home and search for bright-colored insects in her iris garden. The variety always amazed me. I concocted a decent collection, which I carefully skewered with needles from her strawberry-shaped pin cushion. I always had a hard time mounting ladybugs. A ladybug has two beautiful, curved, protective shells when it is walking, being still, or dead. But when it wants to take off, suddenly its armor is transformed into wings, and it can fly unencumbered. As long as it flies, it cannot retain its shell of hardness. Maybe we also need to open our shells before we are able to seize the uplifting experiences that surround us every day.

The body discards cells and makes fresh ones every day, and human beings are being fashioned anew, cell by cell, from the ground up. Our creation is continual, automatic, and magical. Observe it, love it, and believe in it. Building is done most efficiently when cells have a clean and nourishing environment. Unhealthy cells can end up as replacements though, because the same malignant cellular environments are still in place. Every cell in you, even if you have an illness, is not the same one you had a few years ago. The body rebuilds men, women, and children, bigger, better, and stronger, for the nominal cost of good nutritional and lifestyle choices. All this is undoubtedly true, but a few mysteries, possibly the greatest ones of all, still remain.

So far on our journey we have discussed sensible courses of action for building strength in ourselves, yet even so, not every illness will go away. Why are there so many variations in sick people? Why are some people with the same illness healed forever, and why do others die in a month? If cells are discarded and replaced with new ones, why is there still the problem of diseased tissues and malfunctioning parts, even when the sufferer may have greatly improved the biological terrain? Could it be that some old genetic code has superimposed itself upon the new prestamped origins, and once there, does it find some way to outwit the newcomer cells and retain its dominion over that specific locality? This may prove to be the most complicated and disputed question in the history of medicine, because all the theories are as plausible or outrageous as those explaining ghost ships lost without a trace on the Great Lakes.

Although it is fun to experiment with knowledge and tinker with details, it is not really possible to comprehend the intelligence behind how our body orchestrates all its commands every second we are alive. Chemistry cannot explain it. The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference states: “There are between 50 and 75 trillion cells in the body; each second there are about six trillion reactions taking place within each cell....” Living processes therefore require a complexity and speed of networking between innumerable different structures of mass and thought that completely defies computation. The only way this could be accomplished is by every single atom communicating and collaborating at quantum levels far exceeding the speed of light, and frankly, not even the speed of light can account for the wisdom of knowing how to do it all in the exact right order, using vast varieties of differing compounds to fuel the body under the most demanding and changing circumstances. It is therefore quite easy to understand that in the womb of such miraculous processes, rational and scientific inquiry always breaks down and eventually crumbles amidst the slide-rule debris it is limited to. It must finally become obvious that no matter how much time and money is spent, and no matter how many experts are employed, science will never have the last word on health, nature, or culture. Tiny bits and parts of our sciences will be measured as long as man can afford to keep building his elaborate contraptions do so. Those discoveries have and will sometimes help us, but in the end we must bow to the mostly unknowable, because the ultimate source of life, energy, and creation will never be measured.

From the beginning of time, when men and women began a quest to understand the world around them, our ancestors taught their offspring that the mosaic of pleasures, principles, and language that made up their lives—though unscientific to them—was no false wonder. And now, uncounted generations later, if you look beyond the distractions of modern living, it is still easy to see that the entire human spectrum of experience is affected by imperatives that operate beyond the realm of science. So at some point, after you’ve done what you can, you must give up the chase after details that can never be quantified by human measurements, allow the magical web of life to operate on its own, and simply enjoy each day.