Prevention Of Smoking Quotes

Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings—anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness—is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit.

Once upon a time there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. No, no, wait. Once upon a time there were three bears who lived in a wee house in the woods. Once upon a time there were three soldiers, tramping together down the road after the war. Once upon a time there were three little pigs. Once upon a time there were three brothers. No, this is it. This is the variation I want. Once upon a time there were three Beautiful children, two boys and a girl. When each baby was born, the parents rejoiced, the heavens rejoiced, even the fairies rejoiced. The fairies came to christening parties and gave the babies magical gifts. Bounce, effort, and snark. Contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. Sugar, curiosity, and rain. And yet, there was a witch. There's always a witch. This which was the same age as the beautiful children, and as she and they grew, she was jealous of the girl, and jealous of the boys, too. They were blessed with all these fairy gifts, gifts the witch had been denied at her own christening. The eldest boy was strong and fast, capable and handsome. Though it's true, he was exceptionally short. The next boy was studious and open hearted. Though it's true, he was an outsider. And the girl was witty, Generous, and ethical. Though it's true, she felt powerless. The witch, she was none of these things, for her parents had angered the fairies. No gifts were ever bestowed upon her. She was lonely. Her only strength was her dark and ugly magic. She confuse being spartan with being charitable, and gave away her possessions without truly doing good with them. She confuse being sick with being brave, and suffered agonies while imagining she merited praise for it. She confused wit with intelligence, and made people laugh rather than lightening their hearts are making them think. Hey magic was all she had, and she used it to destroy what she most admired. She visited each young person in turn in their tenth birthday, but did not harm them out right. The protection of some kind fairy - the lilac fairy, perhaps - prevented her from doing so. What she did instead was cursed them. "When you are sixteen," proclaimed the witch in a rage of jealousy, "you shall prick your finger on a spindle - no, you shall strike a match - yes, you will strike a match and did in its flame." The parents of the beautiful children were frightened of the curse, and tried, as people will do, to avoid it. They moved themselves and the children far away, to a castle on a windswept Island. A castle where there were no matches. There, surely, they would be safe. There, Surely, the witch would never find them. But find them she did. And when they were fifteen, these beautiful children, just before their sixteenth birthdays and when they're nervous parents not yet expecting it, the jealous which toxic, hateful self into their lives in the shape of a blonde meeting. The maiden befriended the beautiful children. She kissed him and took them on the boat rides and brought them fudge and told them stories. Then she gave them a box of matches. The children were entranced, for nearly sixteen they have never seen fire. Go on, strike, said the witch, smiling. Fire is beautiful. Nothing bad will happen. Go on, she said, the flames will cleanse your souls. Go on, she said, for you are independent thinkers. Go on, she said. What is this life we lead, if you did not take action? And they listened. They took the matches from her and they struck them. The witch watched their beauty burn, Their bounce, Their intelligence, Their wit, Their open hearts, Their charm, Their dreams for the future. She watched it all disappear in smoke.

the top reason doctors give for not counseling patients with high cholesterol to eat healthier is that they think patients may “fear privations related to dietary advice.”65 In other words, doctors perceive that patients would feel deprived of all the junk they’re eating. Can you imagine a doctor saying, “Yeah, I’d like to tell my patients to stop smoking, but I know how much they love it”?

Encountering a corpse forced the man who would be Buddha to see life as a process of unpredictable and constant change. It was life without corpses, trapped behind the palace walls, that had prevented him from reaching enlightenment.

The wreath of cigarette smoke which curls about the head of the growing lad holds his brain in an iron grip which prevents it from growing and his mind from developing.

Though the majority of lung cancer is attributed to smoking, approximately a quarter of all cases occur in people who’ve never smoked.21 Although some of these cases are due to secondhand smoke, another contributing cause may be another potentially carcinogenic plume: fumes from frying.

In Asia, we say that there are three sources of energy--sexual, breath, and spirit...You need to know how to reestablish the balance, or you may act irresponsibly. According to Taoism and buddhism, there are practices to help reestablish that balance, such as meditation or martial arts. You can learn the ways to channel your sexual energy into deep realizations in the domains of art and meditation. The second source of energy is khi, breath energy. Life can be described as a process of burning. In order to burn, every cell in our body needs nutrition and oxygen...Some people cultivate their khi by refraining from smoking and talking, or by practicing conscious breathing after talking a lot...The third soruce of energy is than, spirit energy. When you don't sleep at night, you lose some of this kind of energy. Your nervous system becomes exhausted and you cannot sutdy or practice meditation well, or make good decisions. You don't have a clear mind because of lack of sleep or from worrying too much. Worry and anxiety drain this source of energy. So don't worry. Don't stay up too late. Keep your nervous system healthy. Prevent anxiety. These kinds of practices cultivate the third source of energy. You need this source of energy to practice meditation well. A spritual breakthrough requires the power of your spirit energy, which comes about through concentration and knowing how to preserve this source of energy. When you have strong spirit energy, you only have to focus it on an object, and you will have a breakthrough. If you don't have than, the light of your concentration will not shine brightly, because the light emitted is very weak," (35-36).

There are basically two ways to help people get sufficient money to fund their entire retirement. The first is to get people to save more money, and to start saving at a younger age. The second approach is to get people to die at a younger age. The easier approach, by far, is getting people to die younger. And how might we achieve this? By allowing citizens to smoke. By subsidizing sugary and fatty foods. By limiting access to preventive health care etc. When we think about retirement savings in these terms, it seems that we’re already doing the most we can on this front.

According to the American Lung Association, smoking tobacco contributes to up to 90 percent of all lung cancer deaths. Men who smoke are twenty-three times more likely and women thirteen times more likely to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers. And smokers aren’t just harming themselves; thousands of deaths each year have been attributed to secondhand smoke. Nonsmokers have a 20–30 percent higher risk of developing lung cancer if they’re regularly exposed to cigarette smoke.3

If time was the means by which the universe prevented everything from happening at once, coincidence was the excuse it used when things occasionally did.

Women watched their allies as much as their enemies, if they wished to prevent trouble and keep their power. Especially if all of their subordinates and peers were men. Unfair, perhaps, but practical.

Flavor factories churn out chemical desire. We spray, squirt, and inject hundreds of millions of pounds of those chemicals on food every year, and then we find ourselves surprised and alarmed that people keep eating. We have become so talented at soaking our food in fakeness that the leading cause of preventable death - smoking - bears a troubling resemblance to the second leading cause of preventable death - obesity.

Encountering a corpse forced the man who would be Buddha to see life as a process of unpredictable and constant change. It was life without corpses, trapped behind the palace walls, that had prevented him from reaching enlightenment.

Luz leaned her head against the window. The bus was already on the outskirts of Mexico City and the endless urban landscape had never seemed so gray and or so harsh. Most of the city was nothing like the old money enclave of Lomas Virreyes where the Vegas lived or Polanco where the city’s most expensive restaurants and clubs catered to the wealthy. The bus passed block after block of sooty concrete cut into houses and shops and shanties and parking garages and mercados and schools and more shanties where people lived surrounded by hulks of old cars and plastic things no one bothered to throw away. Sometimes there wasn’t concrete for homes, just sheets of corrugated metal and big pieces of cardboard that would last until the next rainy season. It was the detritus of millions upon millions of people who had nowhere to go and nothing to do and were angry about it. The Reforma newspaper had reported a few weeks ago that the city’s population was in excess of 28 million--more than 25 percent of the country’s entire population--and Luz believed it. All of those people were clawing at each other in a huge fishbowl suspended 7500 feet above sea level, where there was never enough oxygen and the air was thin and dirty. The city was hemmed in by mountains on all sides; mountains like Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl that sometimes spewed smoke and ash and prevented the contaminatión from cars and factories and sewers from escaping. Luz privately thought of it as la sopa--a white soup that often blotted out the stars and prevented the night sky from getting dark. The bus slowed in traffic. As they crept along Luz saw a car stopped on the side of the road, pulled over by a transito traffic cop. As Luz watched, the driver handed the cop a peso bill from his wallet. The transito accepted it but kept talking, gesturing at the car. The motorist handed him another bill. La mordida--the bite--of the traffic cop, right under her nose. Los Hierros was crap.

SHOULD CIRCUMSTANCE PREVENT a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year. The contraband allows incarcerated gang members and narcotics dealers to make business calls from behind bars (and to enjoy a smoke while doing so).

As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from the political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness –which should be relativized and historicized- ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly called “common decency” (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a “spurious infinity” in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects “harassing other subjects, who-in the absence of mores- is to decide what counts as “harassment”? In France, there are associations of obese people demanding all the public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the speciesism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal-for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegeto-phobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right of incest marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . . The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rule. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns a member of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case od meddling with other “ways of life”. It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the “fight against discrimination” is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed from all moral prejudices which, as Michea puts it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.

You want to leave the moat, to go back to the room; you’re already turning and trying to find the door, covered with fake leather, in the steep wall of the moat, but the master succeeds in grabbing your hand and, looking straight in your eyes, says: Your assignment: describe the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a hummingbird, the steeple of the New Maiden Convent, a shoot of bird cherry, the bend of the Lethe, the tail of any village dog, a night of love, mirages over hot asphalt, the bright midday in Berezov, the face of a flibbertigibbet, the garden of hell, compare the termite colony to the forest anthill, the sad fate of leaves to the serenade of a Venetian gondolier, and transform a cicada into a butterfly, turn rain into hail, day into night, give us today our daily bread, make a sibilant out of a vowel, prevent the crash of the train whose engineer is asleep, repeat the thirteenth labor of Hercules, give a smoke to a passerby, explain youth and old age, sing a song about a bluebird bringing water in the morn, turn your face to the north, to the Novgorodian barbicans, and then describe how the doorman knows it is snowing outside, if he sits in the foyer all day, talks to the elevator operator, and does not look out the window because there is no window; yes, tell how exactly, and in addition, plant in your orchard a white rose of the winds, show it to the teacher Pavel and, if he likes it, give the white rose to the teacher Pavel, pin the flower to his cowboy shirt or to his dacha hat, bring joy to the man who departed to nowhere, make your old pedagogue—a joker, a clown, and a wind-chaser—happy.

She takes us to our old spot. A decommissioned train station at the edge of town. It's not a romantic place. A squat utilitarian building chained up to prevent break-ins, and behind it a platform, neglected, left to the slow creep of nature. Mia and I used to come our here and smoke cigarettes and drink beer and smash our bottles on the tracks. A small act of defiance, of destruction. A slice of heaven for two teenage girls who found power in rebellion. "I've got a pack of cigarettes and a pack of beer," She says, "We're about to time travel.

One of the best, but toughest, ways to stop wrinkles is to quit smoking. Each puff you take contains billions and billions of free radicals. Nicotine suffocates the skin, causing it to deteriorate. Cigarettes contain thousands of chemicals that destroy elastin and collagen, the proteins that make your skin taut and wrinkle free. The act of smoking—with its puckering and blowing—also creates “dynamic” wrinkles, those caused by repetitive motion. Smoking also shortens telomeres. Quit smoking to prevent further damage, and allow the DASH diet’s good nutrition to start repairing your skin.

Two decades ago the federal government invited 150,000 men and women to participate in an experiment of screening for cancer in four organs: prostate, lung, colon, and ovary. The volunteers were less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, had higher socioeconomic status, and fewer medical problems than members of the general population. Those are the kinds of people who seek preventive intervention. Of course, they are going to do better. Had the study not been randomized, the investigators might have concluded that screening was the best thing since sliced bread. Regardless of which group they were randomly assigned to, the participants had substantially lower death rates than the general population—for all cancers (even those other than prostate, lung, colon, and ovary), for heart disease, and for injury. In other words, the volunteers were healthier than average. With randomization, the study showed that only one of the four screenings (for colon cancer) was beneficial. Without it, the study might have concluded that prostate cancer screening not only lowered the risk of death from prostate cancer but also deaths from leukemia, heart attack, and car accidents (although you would hope someone would raise the biological plausibility criterion here).

study of thirty thousand elderly people in fifty-two countries found that switching to an overall healthy lifestyle—eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, not smoking, exercising moderately, and not drinking too much alcohol—lowered heart disease rates by approximately 50 percent.14 Reducing exposure to carcinogens, such as tobacco and sodium nitrite, have been shown to decrease the incidence of lung and stomach cancers, and it is likely (more evidence is needed) that lowering exposures to other known carcinogens, such as benzene and formaldehyde, will reduce the incidence of other cancers. Prevention really is the most powerful medicine, but we as a species consistently lack the political or psychological will to act preventively in our own best interests. It is worthwhile to ask to what extent efforts to treat the symptoms of common mismatch diseases have the effect of promoting dysevolution by taking attention and resources away from prevention. On an individual level, am I more likely to eat unhealthy foods and exercise insufficiently if I know I’ll have access to medical care to treat the symptoms of the diseases these choices cause many years later? More broadly within our society, is the money we allocate to treating diseases coming at the expense of money to prevent them?

How long have you known about him?” I asked Jesse, using my free hand to gesture toward his guest. “Forever. Nearly as long as I did about you.” “God, Jesse. Why didn’t you say anything?” “He was a shadow of you.” Jesse shrugged. “His background is diluted, his dragon blood les strong. Even with you in his proximity, I wasn’t certain any of his drakon traits would emerge. He hasn’t anywhere near your potential.” “Pardon me,” Armand said, freezingly polite, “but he is still right here with you in this room.” “Do you mean…I did it?” I asked. “I made him figure it out? What he is?” Jesse gave me an assessing look. “Like is drawn to like. We’re all three of us thick with magic now, even if it’s different kinds. It’s inevitable that we’ll feed off one another. The only way to prevent that would be to separate. And even then it might not be enough. Too much has already begun.” “I don’t want to separate from you,” I said. “No.” Jesse lifted our hands and gave mine a kiss. “Don’t worry about that.” Armand practically rolled his eyes. “If you two are quite done, might we talk some sense tonight? It’s late, I’m tired, and your ruddy chair, Holms, is about as comfortable as sitting on a tack. I want to…” But his voice only faded into silence. He closed his eyes and raised a hand to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose. I noted again those shining nails. The elegance of his bones beneath his flawless skin. Skin that was marble-pale, I realized. Just like mine. “Yes?” I said, more gently than I’d intended. “Excuse me. I’m finding this all a bit…impossible to process. I’m beginning to believe that this is the most profoundly unpleasant dream I’ve ever been caught in.” “Allow me to assure you that you’re awake, Lord Armand,” I retorted, all gentleness gone. “To wit: You hear music no one else does. Distinctive music from gemstones and all sorts of metals. That day I played the piano at Tranquility, I was playing your father’s ruby song, one you must have heard exactly as I did. Exactly as your mother would have. You also have, perhaps, something like a voice inside you. Something specific and base, stronger than instinct, hopeless to ignore. Animals distrust you. You might even dream of smoke or flying.” He dropped his arm. “You got that from the diary.” “No, I got that from my own life. And damned lucky you are to have been brought into this world as a pampered little prince instead of spending your childhood being like this and still having to fend for yourself, as I did.” “Right. Lucky me.” Armand looked at Jesse, his eyes glittering. “And what are you? Another dragon? A gargoyle, perchance, or a werecat?” “Jesse is a star.” The hand went up to conceal his face again. “Of course he is. The. Most. Unpleasant. Dream. Ever.” I separated my hand from Jesse’s, angling for more bread. “I think you’re going to have to show him.” “Aye.” A single blue eye blinked open between Armand’s fingers. “Show me what?

When fat is heated to frying temperatures, whether it be animal fat, such as lard, or plant fat, such as vegetable oil, toxic volatile chemicals with mutagenic properties (those able to cause genetic mutations) are released into the air.22 This happens even before the “smoke point” temperature is reached.23 If you do fry at home, good ventilation in the kitchen may reduce lung cancer risk.24 Cancer risk may also depend on what’s being fried. A study of women in China found that smokers who stir-fried meat every day had nearly three times the odds of lung cancer compared to smokers who stir-fried foods other than meat on a daily basis.25 This is thought to be because of a group of carcinogens called heterocyclic amines that are formed when muscle tissue is subjected to high temperatures.

Looking down on the assembly, standing patiently in the drizzle awaiting a verdict, I suddenly had a vivid understanding of something. Like so many, I had heard, appalled, the reports that trickled out of postwar Germany; the stories of deportations and mass murder, of concentration camps and burnings. And like so many others had done, and would do, for years to come, I had asked myself, “How could the people have let it happen? They must have known, must have seen the trucks, the coming and going, the fences and smoke. How could they stand by and do nothing?” Well, now I knew. The stakes were not even life or death in this case. And Colum’s patronage would likely prevent any physical attack on me. But my hands grew clammy around the porcelain bowl as I thought of myself stepping out, alone and powerless, to confront that mob of solid and virtuous citizens, avid for the excitement of punishment and blood to alleviate the tedium of existence. People are gregarious by necessity. Since the days of the first cave dwellers, humans—hairless, weak, and helpless save for cunning—have survived by joining together in groups; knowing, as so many other edible creatures have found, that there is protection in numbers. And that knowledge, bred in the bone, is what lies behind mob rule. Because to step outside the group, let alone to stand against it, was for uncounted thousands of years death to the creature who dared it. To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary courage; something that went beyond human instinct. And I feared I did not have it, and fearing, was ashamed. It

no matter how you look at the issue, prevention is a fundamentally preferable and more cost-effective way to promote health and longevity. Most people agree that we invest insufficiently in prevention, but they would also surmise that it is difficult to get young, healthy people to avoid behaviors that increase their risk of future illness. Consider smoking, which causes more preventable deaths than any major risk factor (the other big ones being physical inactivity, poor diet, and alcohol abuse). After prolonged legal battles, public health efforts to discourage smoking have managed to halve the percentage of Americans who smoke since the 1950s.19 Yet 20 percent of Americans still smoke, causing 443,000 premature deaths in 2011 at a direct cost of $96 billion per year. Likewise, most Americans know they should be physically active and eat a healthy diet, yet only 20 percent of Americans meet the government’s recommendations for physical activity, and fewer than 20 percent meet government dietary guidelines.20 There are many, diverse reasons we are bad at persuading, nudging, or otherwise encouraging people to use their bodies more as they evolved to be used (more on this later), but one contributing factor could be that we are still following in the footsteps of the marquis de Condorcet, waiting for the next promised breakthrough. Scared of death and hopeful about science, we spend billions of dollars trying to figure out how to regrow diseased organs, hunting for new drugs, and designing artifical body parts to replace the ones we wear out. I am in no way suggesting that we cease investing in these and other areas. Quite the contrary: let’s spend more! But let’s not do so in a way that promotes the pernicious feedback loop of just treating mismatch diseases rather than preventing them. In practical

Breast Growth Tips Ok, here's a tip if you want to grow your breasts. It's not the weed that does it, it's the getting off pills. Annie, for example, had been on pills since she was 16, so nearly 20 years. It took her about 5 months to get completely off pills, with the aid of cannabis and hash, and another 2 months for her breasts to grow. Yes, I helped her with all of this. If she says otherwise, she's lying, as she often does. The growth is not caused by cannabis, but by getting away from the growth-stunting pills. In Annie's case, there was another factor, the activating of her chakras etc. That is important as well. So, to recap, in order to grow your breasts: a. Get off pills and stay off. b. Smoke cannabis and hash to help with a. c. Activate your chakras and kundalini. d. Play with your new boobies. Oil the nipples, it keeps them moist and prevents chafing. That is all. ~ Sienna

IV.The wounded surgeon plies the steelThat questions the distempered part;Beneath the bleeding hands we feelThe sharp compassion of the healer's artResolving the enigma of the fever chart.Our only health is the diseaseIf we obey the dying nurseWhose constant care is not to pleaseBut to remind of our, and Adam's curse,And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.The whole earth is our hospitalEndowed by the ruined millionaire,Wherein, if we do well, we shallDie of the absolute paternal careThat will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.The chill ascends from feet to knees,The fever sings in mental wires.If to be warmed, then I must freezeAnd quake in frigid purgatorial firesOf which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and bloodAgain, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Looking down on the assembly, standing patiently in the drizzle awaiting a verdict, I suddenly had a vivid understanding of something. Like so many, I had heard, appalled, the reports that trickled out of postwar Germany; the stories of deportations and mass murder, of concentration camps and burnings. And like so many others had done, and would do, for years to come, I had asked myself, “How could the people have let it happen? They must have known, must have seen the trucks, the coming and going, the fences and smoke. How could they stand by and do nothing?” Well, now I knew. The stakes were not even life or death in this case. And Colum’s patronage would likely prevent any physical attack on me. But my hands grew clammy around the porcelain bowl as I thought of myself stepping out, alone and powerless, to confront that mob of solid and virtuous citizens, avid for the excitement of punishment and blood to alleviate the tedium of existence. People are gregarious by necessity. Since the days of the first cave dwellers, humans—hairless, weak, and helpless save for cunning—have survived by joining together in groups; knowing, as so many other edible creatures have found, that there is protection in numbers. And that knowledge, bred in the bone, is what lies behind mob rule. Because to step outside the group, let alone to stand against it, was for uncounted thousands of years death to the creature who dared it. To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary courage; something that went beyond human instinct.

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.

I took up the pestle as she left, and pounded and ground automatically, paying little heed to the results. The shut window blocked the sound both of the rain and the crowd below; the two blended in a soft, pattering susurrus of menace. Like any schoolchild, I had read Dickens. And earlier authors, as well, with their descriptions of the pitiless justice of these times, meted out to all illdoers, regardless of age or circumstance. But to read, from a cozy distance of one or two hundred years, accounts of child hangings and judicial mutilation, was a far different thing than to sit quietly pounding herbs a few feet above such an occurrence. Could I bring myself to interfere directly, if the sentence went against the boy? I moved to the window, carrying the mortar with me, and peered out. The crowd had increased, as merchants and housewives, attracted by the gathering, wandered down the High Street to investigate. Newcomers leaned close as the standees excitedly relayed the details, then merged into the body of the crowd, more faces turned expectantly to the door of the house. Looking down on the assembly, standing patiently in the drizzle awaiting a verdict, I suddenly had a vivid understanding of something. Like so many, I had heard, appalled, the reports that trickled out of postwar Germany; the stories of deportations and mass murder, of concentration camps and burnings. And like so many others had done, and would do, for years to come, I had asked myself, “How could the people have let it happen? They must have known, must have seen the trucks, the coming and going, the fences and smoke. How could they stand by and do nothing?” Well, now I knew. The stakes were not even life or death in this case. And Colum’s patronage would likely prevent any physical attack on me. But my hands grew clammy around the porcelain bowl as I thought of myself stepping out, alone and powerless, to confront that mob of solid and virtuous citizens, avid for the excitement of punishment and blood to alleviate the tedium of existence. People are gregarious by necessity. Since the days of the first cave dwellers, humans—hairless, weak, and helpless save for cunning—have survived by joining together in groups; knowing, as so many other edible creatures have found, that there is protection in numbers. And that knowledge, bred in the bone, is what lies behind mob rule. Because to step outside the group, let alone to stand against it, was for uncounted thousands of years death to the creature who dared it. To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary courage; something that went beyond human instinct. And I feared I did not have it, and fearing, was ashamed.

President George H. W. Bush flew to Rio de Janeiro to sign the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which committed its signatories to preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.”107 President Bush then pledged to translate the written document into “concrete action to protect the planet.

When we react to problems, as opposed to create with them, we get hooked into stress. When we are under constant low-grade stress—and it’s estimated that over 80 percent of us are all the time—this begins to hurt us.1 When we are stressed, our nervous system tightens up and we lose our creativity. Stress stops us learning, and if we aren’t learning, we aren’t growing.2 Stress, AKA fear, corrodes the curiosity and courage we need to experiment with the new. It is almost impossible to play big in life, if we are scared of looking like idiots, going bankrupt, or being rejected. Stress kills creativity and kills us too. Whereas small amounts of stress help us focus, engage, and learn, chronic or elevated stress burns us out, literally as well as metaphorically. People who live near airports and deal with the stress of giant airplanes roaring above them have higher rates of cardiac arrest than those who don’t.3 People who deal with a controlling or uncommunicative boss have a 60 percent higher chance of developing coronary heart disease than those who don’t.4 Stress leads to tangible changes inside all the cells of the body. Specific genes start to express proteins, which leads to inflammation; and chronic inflammation is associated with killers such as heart disease and cancer. Over time, stress reduces our ability to prevent aging, heal wounds, fight infections, and even be successfully immunized.5 Unmanaged stress, simply from having a sense of disempowerment at work, can be more dangerous than smoking or high cholesterol.

With this in mind, the American Heart Association came up with “The Simple 7” factors that can lead to a healthier life: not smoking, not being overweight, being “very active” (defined as the equivalent of walking at least twenty-two minutes a day), eating healthier (for example, lots of fruits and vegetables), having below-average cholesterol, having normal blood pressure, and having normal blood sugar levels.27 The American Heart Association’s goal is to reduce heart-disease deaths by 20 percent by 2020.28 If more than 90 percent of heart attacks may be avoided with lifestyle changes,29 why so modest an aim?

FAMILY SYSTEM ROLES All families have roles. The father and mother play their roles of modeling what it is to be a man or woman, father or mother. Parents also model how to be intimate, have boundaries, cope with problems, fight fair, problem-solve, etc. The role of children is to be curious and to be learners. Members of a healthy family have flexible roles. Mom may be the heroine because she baked a special cake. Daughter may take over that role when she volunteers to do the dishes. Son becomes the hero when he notices smoke coming out the stove and prevents a fire. Dad’s the hero when he takes the family on a vacation.

Even though our eating habits are now killing more Americans than our smoking habits,32 I often hear the refrain in public health circles that we have to work with, rather than against, these companies, because unlike with tobacco, we don’t have to smoke, but we do have to eat.33 Well, yes, we need to breathe—but we don’t need to breathe smoke. And yes, we need to eat, but we don’t need to eat junk.

I mostly saw Vince Foster in the hallways. He was Mrs. Clinton’s personal attaché, a lawyer from Arkansas. Word circulated that she berated him mercilessly. The first time I saw Foster I figured he wouldn’t last a year. He looked uncomfortable and unhappy in the White House. I knew what it was like to be yelled at by superiors, but Mrs. Clinton never hesitated to launch a tirade. Yet her staffers never dared say, “I don’t have to take this shit!” They reminded me of battered wives: too loyal, too unwilling to acknowledge they’d never assuage her. They had no one to blame but themselves, but they could never admit it. She criticized Foster for failing to get ahead of the constant scandals, for cabinet positions not confirmed, and for the slowness of staffing the White House. Foster eventually took his own life in Fort Marcy Park. In his briefcase was a note torn into twenty-seven pieces, blaming the FBI, the media, the Republicans—even the White House Ushers Office. A rumor circulated among law enforcement types that contended his suicide weapon had to be repaired in order for the forensics team to fire it since it wouldn’t function for them. Maybe his final shot misaligned the cylinders and later prevented contact with the bullet primers. But that, along with many other public details of the case (carpet fibers on his suit coat, etc.), made his case spooky. The last lines of his sparse suicide note read: “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.” A UD friend of mine, Hank O’Neil, was posted outside of Foster’s office as part of the FBI’s investigation of his suicide. Maggie Williams, Mrs. Clinton’s always well dressed chief of staff, physically pushed her way past Hank into Foster’s office, arguing that he had no right to block her entrance. She removed boxes that were never recovered; they were destroyed. Congressmen bashed Officer O’Neil’s integrity, but he held firm. He reported exactly what he saw and didn’t make any inferences about it, but they were sure he held some smoking gun and was protecting the Clintons.

We can’t prevent all DNA damage—and we wouldn’t want to because it’s essential for the function of the immune system and even for consolidating our memories57—but we do want to prevent extra damage. And there’s a lot of extra damage to be had out there. Cigarettes, for starters. There aren’t many legal vices out there that are worse for your epigenome than the deadly concoction of thousands of chemicals smokers put into their bodies every day. There’s a reason why smokers seem to age faster: they do age faster. The DNA damage that results from smoking keeps the DNA repair crews working overtime, and likely the result is the epigenetic instability that causes aging. And although I’m not likely to be the first person you’ll hear this from, it nonetheless bears repeating: smoking is not a private, victimless activity. The levels of DNA-damaging aromatic amines in cigarette smoke are about fifty to sixty times as high in secondhand as in firsthand smoke.58 If you do smoke, it is worth trying to quit.

when the ACE study data started to appear on his computer screen, he realized that they had stumbled upon the gravest and most costly public health issue in the United States: child abuse. He had calculated that its overall costs exceeded those of cancer or heart disease and that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters.20 It would also have a dramatic effect on workplace performance and vastly decrease the need for incarceration. When the surgeon general’s report on smoking and health was published in 1964, it unleashed a decades-long legal and medical campaign that has changed daily life and long-term health prospects for millions. The number of American smokers fell from 42 percent of adults in 1965 to 19 percent in 2010, and it is estimated that nearly 800,000 deaths from lung cancer were prevented between 1975 and 2000.21 The ACE study, however, has had no such effect. Follow-up studies and papers are still appearing around the world, but the day-to-day reality of children like Marilyn and the children in outpatient clinics and residential treatment centers around the country remains virtually the same. Only now they receive high doses of psychotropic agents, which makes them more tractable but which also impairs their ability to feel pleasure and curiosity, to grow and develop emotionally and intellectually, and to become contributing members of society.

While positive mental states may be associated with less stress and more resilience to infection, positive well-being might also be accompanied by a healthy lifestyle. In general, people who feel satisfied appear to smoke less, exercise more, and eat healthier.7 So is being happier just a marker of good health and not a cause of it? To find out, researchers set out to make people sick.

the more horrifying the images, the more they will prompt smokers to relieve their anxiety by smoking. However, these images may be quite effective at preventing people from taking up the habit, or strengthening a smoker’s intention to quit.

not smoking, not being obese, getting a half hour of exercise a day, and eating healthier—defined as consuming more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less meat. Those four factors alone were found to account for 78 percent of chronic disease risk.

Imagine a drug that can intoxicate us, can infuse us with energy, and can do so when taken by mouth. It doesn’t have to be injected, smoked, or snorted for us to experience its sublime and soothing effects. Imagine that it mixes well with virtually every food and particularly liquids, and that when given to infants it provokes a feeling of pleasure so profound and intense that its pursuit becomes a driving force throughout their lives. Overconsumption of this drug may have long-term side effects, but there are none in the short term—no staggering or dizziness, no slurring of speech, no passing out or drifting away, no heart palpitations or respiratory distress. When it is given to children, its effects may be only more extreme variations on the apparently natural emotional roller coaster of childhood, from the initial intoxication to the tantrums and whining of what may or may not be withdrawal a few hours later. More than anything, our imaginary drug makes children happy, at least for the period during which they’re consuming it. It calms their distress, eases their pain, focuses their attention, and then leaves them excited and full of joy until the dose wears off. The only downside is that children will come to expect another dose, perhaps to demand it, on a regular basis. How long would it be before parents took to using our imaginary drug to calm their children when necessary, to alleviate pain, to prevent outbursts of unhappiness, or to distract attention? And once the drug became identified with pleasure, how long before it was used to celebrate birthdays, a soccer game, good grades at school? How long before it became a way to communicate love and celebrate happiness? How long before no gathering of family and friends was complete without it, before major holidays and celebrations were defined in part by the use of this drug to assure pleasure? How long would it be before the underprivileged of the world would happily spend what little money they had on this drug rather than on nutritious meals for their families?

With the Confederate army divided and Pope’s army between them, Pope was now positioned to prevent them from linking up by blocking the Thoroughfare Gap. Ultimately he opted not to, later claiming that when he saw smoke from the flames shooting near Manassas, he figured he had Jackson in trouble and could annihilate the Confederates before Longstreet reunited with them. In fact, those flames were coming from his own supplies, after Jackson’s men began torching what they couldn’t carry.

Consider heart attacks. Even as recently as the 1950s, we had little idea of how to prevent or treat them. We didn’t know, for example, about the danger of high blood pressure, and had we been aware of it we wouldn’t have known what to do about it. The first safe medication to treat hypertension was not developed and conclusively demonstrated to prevent disease until the 1960s. We didn’t know about the role of cholesterol, either, or genetics or smoking or diabetes. Furthermore,

When your smoking habit erases the antioxidant-boosting effects of eight hundred cups of kale, you know it's time to quit.

DASH Wrinkles One of the best, but toughest, ways to stop wrinkles is to quit smoking. Each puff you take contains billions and billions of free radicals. Nicotine suffocates the skin, causing it to deteriorate. Cigarettes contain thousands of chemicals that destroy elastin and collagen, the proteins that make your skin taut and wrinkle free. The act of smoking—with its puckering and blowing—also creates “dynamic” wrinkles, those caused by repetitive motion. Smoking also shortens telomeres. Quit smoking to prevent further damage, and allow the DASH diet’s good nutrition to start repairing your skin.

So far, none of the six lifeboats that had left the Titanic had been filled to capacity, and none had carried any second- or third-class passengers. Second-class passengers had been told to board from their own promenade area farther aft on the boat deck. Crowds of steerage passengers, meanwhile, were waiting patiently in the well decks, while others sat in the third-class general and smoking rooms, chatting and playing cards. The gates leading up from the aft well deck had been locked to prevent men from third class from going up to the boats. But a number of them had climbed onto the large round bases of the two cargo cranes and were clambering along the arms of the cranes into second class.

Solid-steel fire doors had been built into entrances to the public rooms to deal with just such an emergency. It would have taken Hackney only a few moments to isolate the writing room from the rest of B deck by lowering its fire door. Clarence Hackney did not take that preventive measure. Smoke billowed after him as he ran for the telephone near the door connecting the first-class lounge to the smoking room. He dialed the bridge.

No state in America has taken more aggressive action to reduce the public’s exposure to chemicals, and to secondhand smoke, than California. California banned the sale of flavored tobacco, because it appeals to children, and the use of smokeless tobacco in the state’s five professional baseball stadiums. It prohibited the use of e-cigarettes in government and private workplaces, restaurants, bars, and casinos. San Francisco in late 2020 banned cigarette smoking in apartments.8 In the fall of 2020, California outlawed companies from using in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal care products twenty-four chemicals it had deemed dangerous.9 And yet breathing secondhand smoke and being exposed to trace chemicals in your shampoo are hardly sufficient to kill. By contrast, hard drug use is both a necessary and sufficient cause to kill, as the 93,000 overdose and drug poisoning deaths of 2020 show. And yet, where the governments of San Francisco, California, and other progressive cities and states stress the remote dangers of cosmetics, pesticides, and secondhand smoke, they downplay the immediate dangers of hard drugs including fentanyl. In 2020, San Francisco even paid for two billboards promoting the safe use of heroin and fentanyl, which had been created by the Harm Reduction Coalition. The first had a picture of an older African American man smiling. The headline read, “Change it up. Injecting drugs has the highest risk of overdose, so consider snorting or smoking instead.” The second billboard’s photograph was of a racially diverse group of people at a party smiling and laughing. The headline read, “Try not to use alone. Do it with friends. Use with people and take turns.”10 When I asked Kristen Marshall of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which oversees San Francisco’s overdose prevention strategy, about the threat posed by fentanyl, she said, “People use it safely all the time. This narrative that gets it labeled as an insane poison where you touch it and die—that’s not how drugs work. It’s not cyanide. It’s not uranium. It’s just a synthetic opioid, but one that’s on an unregulated market.

We’re passing the burning ground, mum, at the foot o’ the slave market,” Maitland explained, overhearing my question. He pointed toward the shore, where a plume of white smoke rose from behind a screen of bayberry bushes. “They burn the bodies of the slaves who don’t survive their passage from Africa,” he explained. “First they unload the living cargo, and then, as the ship is swabbed out, the bodies are removed and thrown onto the pyre here, to prevent sickness spreading into the town.

Your body wants to be healthy. And every night of your smoking life, as you fall asleep, that healing process is re-started until... bam! you light up your first cigarette the next morning. Just as you can reinjure your lungs with every puff, you can reinjure your arteries with every bite. You can choose moderation and hit yourself with a smaller hammer, but why beat yourself up at all? You can choose to stop damaging yourself, get out of your own way, and let your body's natural healing process bring you back toward health.

Dresses, jackets, trousers, and other articles of clothing were ripped to shreds as people tried to get through to the exits and escape the flames and smoke. When the crowd reached the doors, they found many of them locked. The locking mechanisms had been so confusing to the staff that they had not tried to open them before they fled. Other doors couldn’t be opened. They had been designed to swing inward rather than outward, and the crush of people prevented those in the front from pulling the doors open.

The elevated stomach cancer risk associated with salt intake appears on par with that of smoking or heavy alcohol use but may only be half as bad as opium use

more grilled, barbecued, or smoked meats over their lifetimes may have as much as 47 percent higher odds of breast cancer.60 And the Iowa Women’s Health Study found that women who ate their bacon, beefsteak, and burgers “very well done” had nearly five times the odds of getting breast cancer compared with women who preferred these meats served rare or medium.61 To see what was happening inside the breast, researchers asked women undergoing breast-reduction surgery about their meat-cooking methods.

with “The Simple 7” factors that can lead to a healthier life: not smoking, not being overweight, being “very active” (defined as the equivalent of walking at least twenty-two minutes a day), eating healthier (for example, lots of fruits and vegetables), having below-average cholesterol, having normal blood pressure, and having normal blood sugar levels.27 The American Heart Association’s goal is to reduce heart-disease deaths by 20 percent

The truth is that adhering to just four simple healthy lifestyle factors can have a strong impact on the prevention of chronic diseases: not smoking, not being obese, getting a half hour of exercise a day, and eating healthier—defined as consuming more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less meat. Those four factors alone were found to account for 78 percent of chronic disease risk.

Asian populations also eat more mushrooms.149 As noted in the box on red wine here, white mushrooms have also been shown to block the estrogen synthase enzyme, at least in a petri dish. So researchers decided to investigate if there was a link between mushroom intake and breast cancer. They compared the mushroom consumption of one thousand breast cancer patients to one thousand healthy subjects of similar age, weight, and smoking and exercise status.

DAWN TREADER SOUP When Caspian, King of Narnia, in the company of Reepicheep the mouse knight, Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace, decides to go in search of the lost Lords of Narnia, he sets sail on a ship called the Dawn Treader. The crew experiences many adventures at sea and on land, and have to live off the food on board and what they can find around them. This soup was a particular favorite of Eustace…. At least, until he turned into a dragon! This recipe can easily be made on board a ship, using produce from the sea and supplies from the hold. INGREDIENTS • serves 4 1 lb 2 oz clams 2 3/4 oz smoked bacon 1 shallot 1 1/2 oz butter 3 sprigs thyme 1 bay leaf 1 T flour 2 cooked potatoes, chopped into chunks 1 3/4 oz crème fraîche or sour cream Salt and pepper PREPARATION TIME • 15 mins COOKING TIME • 25 mins Collect the clams on the island of Felimath, rinse them carefully, and place in a cauldron with about 4 oz of water. Boil them for 2 minutes, until the clams open, and discard any that remain closed. Drain the clams, saving the juices, and remove them from their shells. Strain and reserve the juices through a piece of cheesecloth. Chop the bacon and let it brown for a few minutes in a nonstick frying pan. Drain off the excess fat and set the bacon aside on paper towels. Peel the shallot, sauté it for 5 minutes in the butter without browning, then add the bacon, thyme, and bay leaf before the ship reaches the Dark Island. Sprinkle with the flour and let the shallot and bacon cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Slowly add the clam juice, stirring at the same time to prevent lumps forming, then add the potato chunks and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove bay leaf and purée with a blender until the soup is quite smooth. Add the clams and the crème fraîche or sour cream, reheat for 2 minutes, season with salt and pepper, and serve. Note: Reepicheep likes to add a handful of samphire to nibble with this soup.

At the time, the library's fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage.

curcumin pills; they merely got less than a teaspoon a day of just the regular turmeric spice you’d find at the grocery store. Of course, turmeric can’t completely mitigate the effects of smoking. Even after the participants ate turmeric for a month, the DNA-damaging ability of the smokers’ urine still exceeded that of the nonsmokers’. But smokers who make turmeric a staple of their diets may help lessen some of the damage.

cancer is attributed to smoking, approximately a quarter of all cases occur in people who’ve never smoked.21 Although some of these cases are due to secondhand smoke, another contributing cause may be another potentially carcinogenic plume: fumes from frying. When fat is heated to frying temperatures, whether it be animal fat, such as lard, or plant fat, such as vegetable oil, toxic volatile chemicals with mutagenic

When meat is grilled, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are also produced, one of the probable carcinogens in cigarette smoke. The researchers discovered that not only was the ingestion of grilled meat in the third trimester associated with smaller birth weights, mothers merely exposed to the fumes tended to give birth to babies with a birth weight deficit. Exposure to the fumes was also associated with a smaller head size, an indicator of brain volume.

nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.83 The news is good. A 2013 review of the best studies to date found that people who drank the most coffee had half the risk of liver cancer compared to those who drank the least.84 A subsequent study found the consumption of four or more cups of coffee a day was associated with 92 percent lower risk among smokers dying from chronic liver disease.85 Of course, quitting smoking would have helped as well; smoking may multiply by as much as tenfold the odds of those with hepatitis C dying from

Did you know that one hot dog has as many nitrosamines (and nitrosamides, which are similar tobacco carcinogens103) as four cigarettes and that these carcinogens are also found in fresh meat, including beef, chicken, and pork?104 This may help explain the rising rates of kidney cancer over the last few decades despite the falling rates of smoking. Clearing the Confusion: Nitrates, Nitrites, and Nitrosamines Although fresh meat also contains nitrosamines, processed

within about fifteen years of stopping smoking, your lung-cancer risk approaches that of a lifelong nonsmoker.

Earlier, I discussed the 2007 study of Long Island women that linked breast cancer risk to the heterocyclic amines formed in meat. Older women consuming the most grilled, barbecued, or smoked meat over their lifetimes were found to have 47 percent increased odds of breast cancer. Those with high meat intake who also had low fruit and vegetable intake had 74 percent higher odds.101 Low fruit and vegetable intake may just be a sign of unhealthy habits overall, but increasing evidence suggests that there may be something in produce

In 2002, members of these morality police prevented fifteen schoolgirls from fleeing a fire because they were inappropriately dressed. With flames and smoke reaching up to the windows of their dormitory, the girls did not have time to grab their abayas before rushing for the doors. They were turned back in order to observe a dress code and they all died.

Plant-based diets are the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking.”66

had general anesthesia (and how many times). General anesthesia combines some toxicity of the anesthetics with what is often imperfect oxygenation, and this can affect brain function. have dental amalgams. These expose you to inorganic mercury. eat high-mercury fish. This exposes you to organic mercury. take certain medications (especially any with brain effects, such as benzodiazepines like Valium, antidepressants, blood pressure pills, statins, proton pump inhibitors, or antihistamines). used street drugs. drink alcohol (and how much). smoke cigarettes. practice good oral hygiene. Poor oral hygiene can contribute to inflammation. have surgical implants (artificial hips or breast implants, for instance). have liver, kidney, lung, or heart disease. snore.

Bosun Calhoun then launched into an account of the attack the day before and reviewed the damage suffered by the sunken battleships. He said the USS Nevada was berthed astern of the Arizona when she was struck by a torpedo in her bow. She managed to get under way with her guns blazing, the only battleship able to do so. As she rounded the southern tip of Ford Island, she was smashed with an avalanche of bombs, which started intense fires. When the thick, pungent smoke from the fires poured into the machinery spaces, the black gang, or engineers, headed for topside and fresh air. This forced abandonment left the pumping machinery inoperative. The forward ammunition magazines were purposely flooded to prevent explosions from the fires, but the after magazines were also flooded by mistake, which caused the ship to sink lower and lower in the water. In addition, ballast tanks were flooded on the starboard side to correct a port list. As more water entered the ship, many fittings that passed through watertight bulkheads began to leak, flooding all machinery spaces and causing loss of all electrical and mechanical power. Nevada was sinking in the ship channel.

Foods can fuel your heart, supplements can support it, and exercise can strengthen it. But never neglect the “hidden” emotional and psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of heart disease as surely as smoking, a high-sugar diet, stress, high blood pressure, and lack of exercise do.

Over the course of the national [truth] campaign, teen smoking rates dropped by 75 percent. Teens were less likely to start smoking, and those who already smoked were less likely to continue. The program prevented more than 450,000 youths from smoking in the first four years alone and saved tens of billions of dollars in health care costs.

In the turbulent century between 1850 and 1950, the world offered conflict, atomisation and disorientation. The cigarette offered its equal and opposite salve: camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and the familiarity of habits. If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventible cause: tobacco.

7 Just as you don’t have to wait for your physician to tell you to stop smoking, you don’t have to wait to start eating healthier

While it’s tricky to impossible to avoid or prevent the genetic mutations that help give rise to cancer, it is relatively easy to address the metabolic factors that feed it. I’m not suggesting that it’s possible to “starve” cancer or that any particular diet will magically make cancer go away; cancer cells always seem to be able to obtain the energy supply they need. What I am saying is that we don’t want to be anywhere on that spectrum of insulin resistance to type 2 diabetes, where our cancer risk is clearly elevated. To me, this is the low-hanging fruit of cancer prevention, right up there with quitting smoking. Getting our metabolic health in order is essential to our anticancer strategy.

We are soon to have everywhere,” wrote one futurist, “smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonators, sterilizers of water, air, food, and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads, and subways.

Hm. A dal bean curry, eh? It looks similar to Chana Masala, a Punjabi dish that uses chickpeas... ! This viscous stickiness...!" "It's Natto!" Gooey texture and savory flavor are melding together inside my mouth! Was natto ever this delicious? "Wait... this is no normal natto! Could it be..." "Yes, sir. This natto I made by hand using charcoal smoke. It's charcoal-aged natto. After I added the natto spores to a batch of soybeans, I stored them in an underground room. There I lit a charcoal fire and then kept the room at just the right temperature and humidity to ferment the soybeans. As this process takes several days to complete, I prepared it ahead of time, over my summer break." "The carbon dioxide generated by the charcoal fire impacts the maturation of the soy proteins. It gives the natto a richer flavor. It also halts bacteria death in the beans, preventing the typical smell of ammonia from developing!" "Did you know all that?" "I heard a little about it once. It's supposed to be a really hard process that takes loads of time to finish!" "And she made it by herself?!" "But that isn't all. There's another flavor--- a deeper, more savory one that resonates across the tongue like a deep bass chord." "Oh, that? As a special hidden seasoning, I added shoyu koji." SHOYU KOJI Instead of salt, soy sauce is added to the koji bacteria and mixed with the rice until thick. Then it is left to ferment at a constant temperature for several weeks. So that's the black stuff that was in that jar! Shoyu koji has over ten times glutamic acid---an umami component--- than shio koji does. I see. While the strong flavor of curry spices drowns out most other seasonings, shoyu koji's flavor is powerful enough to that it is instead a savory magnifier! Her curry takes full advantage of her detailed knowledge of fermentation techniques! It is truly a magnificent dish! "The creamy Japanese-style curry roux has blended in with the natto's gooeyness beautifully!" "The mound of crisp, minced green onion on top is hard to resist as well!"

The melon of belly expanding, contracting. Nowadays babies were always put to sleep on their backs; in facedown position they would succumb to SIDS, if the pediatricians were to be believed. This “back-is-best” propaganda was news to Willa, whose kids were born in the decade when babies always had to be put to sleep on their tummies, lest they die of SIDS. The absolutism of these Cheshire-cat dogmas seemed funny, or maybe valiant. Probably nobody knew why little lives sometimes evaporated like smoke, but all guardians wanted to be given the amulet of prevention. And they didn’t want “maybe.

In the last 120 years, coronary artery disease has exploded more than two-and-a-half-fold to become a leading cause of death worldwide.38 Since Jeremy Morris’s pioneering study on London bus conductors first pointed the way, it has become indisputable that coronary artery disease is a largely preventable mismatch caused by a combination of formerly rare risk factors: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and chronic inflammation.39 These harbingers of disease, in turn, are affected by genes but are mostly caused by the same interrelated behavioral risk factors we keep encountering: smoking, obesity, bad diets, stress, and physical inactivity.

To explore how physical activity helps but doesn’t entirely prevent cardiovascular diseases, let’s return to the trinity of intertwined factors that are the root causes of the problem: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and inflammation. Cholesterol. A cholesterol test usually measures the levels of three molecules in your blood. The first is low-density lipoprotein (LDL), often termed bad cholesterol. Your liver produces these balloon-like molecules to transport fats and cholesterol throughout your bloodstream, but some LDLs have a harmful tendency to burrow into the walls of arteries, especially when blood pressure is high. These intrusions cause an inflammatory reaction that generates plaques. The second type of cholesterol is high-density lipoprotein (HDL), sometimes called good cholesterol, because these molecules scavenge and return LDLs back to the liver. The third type are triglycerides, fat molecules that are floating freely in the bloodstream and a signpost for metabolic syndrome. To make a long story short, diets rich in sugar and saturated fats contribute to cardiovascular disease because they promote high levels of plaque-forming LDLs. Conversely, physical activity helps prevent cardiovascular disease by lowering triglycerides, raising HDL levels, and to a lesser degree lowering LDL. Blood pressure. A blood pressure test gives you two readings: the higher (systolic) number is the pressure your heart’s main chamber overcomes when it squeezes blood throughout your body; the lower (diastolic) number is the pressure your heart experiences as its main chamber fills with blood. By convention high blood pressure is a reading greater than 130/90 or 140/90. Blood pressures above these values are concerning because, unabated, they damage the walls of arteries, making them vulnerable to invasion by plaque-inducing LDLs. As we already saw, once plaques start to form, blood pressure can rise, potentially stimulating yet more plaques. Chronically high blood pressure also strains the heart, causing it to thicken abnormally and weaken. By forcing more blood to flow more rapidly through arteries, physical activity stimulates the generation of new arteries throughout the body and helps keep existing arteries supple, protecting against high blood pressure. Inflammation. Plaques don’t form out of the blue but instead occur when white blood cells in the bloodstream react to the inflammation caused by LDLs and high blood pressure. Chronic inflammation also increases one’s likelihood of developing plaques from high cholesterol and blood pressure.40 And, as we have previously seen, while inflammation is caused by factors such as obesity, junky diets, excess alcohol, and smoking, it is substantially lowered by physical activity.

It was built way back in the Sixties, and with that long lifespan, that capacity year-in year-out, and the inevitable deaths[6], you would think the dorm was haunted. However, from my own experience, it was only ever haunted by the Ghost of the Half Eaten Pizza From a Week Ago or the Spirit of the Guys Two Doors Down Who Think Towels Under the Door Prevents Everybody From Knowing They’re Smoking Pot. Real ghosts would have made the place more interesting.

Anger, if not allowed to fester and grow out of proportion, is healthy, like a smoke alarm that if heeded can prevent all sorts of damage.

not smoking, not being obese, getting half an hour of exercise a day, and eating healthier—defined as consuming more fruits, veggies, and whole grains and less meat. Those four factors alone were found to account for 78 percent of chronic disease risk.

Heart Disease Starts in Childhood In 1953, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association radically changed our understanding of the development of heart disease. Researchers conducted a series of three hundred autopsies on American casualties of the Korean War, with an average age of around twenty-two. Shockingly, 77 percent of soldiers already had visible evidence of coronary atherosclerosis. Some even had arteries that were blocked off 90 percent or more.20 The study “dramatically showed that atherosclerotic changes appear in the coronary arteries years and decades before the age at which coronary heart disease (CHD) becomes a clinically recognized problem.”21 Later studies of accidental death victims between the ages of three and twenty-six found that fatty streaks—the first stage of atherosclerosis—were found in nearly all American children by age ten.22 By the time we reach our twenties and thirties, these fatty streaks can turn into full-blown plaques like those seen in the young American GIs of the Korean War. And by the time we’re forty or fifty, they can start killing us off. If there’s anyone reading this over the age of ten, the question isn’t whether or not you want to eat healthier to prevent heart disease but whether or not you want to reverse the heart disease you very likely already have. Just how early do these fatty streaks start to appear? Atherosclerosis may start even before birth. Italian researchers looked inside arteries taken from miscarriages and premature newborns who died shortly after birth. It turns out that the arteries of fetuses whose mothers had high LDL cholesterol levels were more likely to contain arterial lesions.23 This finding suggests that atherosclerosis may not just start as a nutritional disease of childhood but one during pregnancy. It’s become commonplace for pregnant women to avoid smoking and drinking alcohol. It’s also never too early to start eating healthier for the next generation.

Lots of traffic heading into town. One dirty, smoke-belching van makes me so angry that if I’d been alongside I think I would have had a go at the driver. I’d rather see pollution wardens than parking wardens but I suppose there’s no money in pollution prevention.

Life is a daily battle with people and things that are trying to change us and those that are trying to prevent us from changing.