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Despite all the warnings and public service announcements, fires and burns continue to be a leading cause of unintentional-injury deaths in U.S. homes. According to the National Fire Prevention Association (NFPA), fires currently cause about 4,700 deaths a year-nearly 4,000 (80 percent) of which are in the home. “Too often people mistakenly think that home fires are something that happens to someone else,” says Susan McKelvey of the NFPA.

Maybe it’s all those years spent playing fireman, but men in particular have a tendency to overestimate their fire safety knowledge, says McKelvey.

“Our most recent survey shows that though 63 percent of men said they felt confident about fire safety, twice as many men as women die in fires,” McKelvey says. “The first and foremost rule when it comes to fire is, don’t be a hero. Get out of the house and stay out.” Even better, prevent fires in the first place. Here is what the NFPA recommends.

Carry a spoon. The largest cause of home fires in the United States is cooking, says McKelvey. “You’re cooking. The phone rings. You leave the kitchen and forget all about your cooking. Next thing you know you smell smoke and return to find a fire. This type of scenario happens quite frequently,” she says. Never leave cooking unattended, but if you need to leave the kitchen, carry a kitchen spoon or spatula with you to remind you that something’s on the stove or in the oven, McKelvey suggests.

Keep a mitt on hand. Here’s a simple but highly effective fire-prevention tactic. Keep an oven mitt that covers your arm by the stove along with a pot lid that fits the pan you are cooking with. That way, if those sweet potato fries go up in flames, you can quickly slide a mitt on your hand and a lid over that fire, says McKelvey. Then turn off the stove and let the pan cool completely. Don’t lift the lid or you might re-ignite the flame, she says.

Flush that cigar. The kitchen may be the biggest hot spot in the house, but according to the NFPA, fires caused by careless smoking kill more than 800 people a year. The classic no-no, of course, is smoking in bed. You know not to do that. What you need to watch is how you dispose of cigarettes and cigars. “Too often, people think that their smoking materials are extinguished, they throw them out, and the hot butts smolder for hours, eventually causing a fire in the middle of the night,” McKelvey says. “The best practice is dousing cigarette butts thoroughly before discarding them by flushing ashtray contents down the toilet. Be especially aware of how your guests dispose of cigar and cigarette butts, particularly at parties where people are often drinking and not paying close attention.”

Separate flammables. A simple reminder: Keep all combustible materials such as paint thinners and oils in sealed metal containers away from heat sources, says McKelvey. “Garages and basements are potential fire hazards.”

Hang those detectors. Finally, install at least one smoke detector on every level of your home and in or near every sleeping area, McKelvey says. “Test them once a month and replace the battery annually. Having smoke detectors in your home cuts your chance of dying in a fire nearly in half,” she says. And to make sure that you remember to change the batteries in those babies every year, tie the battery-changing to an annual event, such as your birthday, or when you set the clocks forward or back in the spring or fall.

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Stripped to its essentials, eating is the process by which we bring life-supporting chemicals into our bodies, an act that occurs at reasonably predictable intervals over the course of a day. Once the food is ingested, acids and enzymes in the stomach break it down, after which it passes into the intestine.

The nutrients, such as glucose, fatty acids, and proteins, pass into the bloodstream and float along until they reach their various destinations: the liver, the muscles, and so on. The body uses some of the nutrients immediately. Others pass into reservoirs, such as the fat cells, where they bide their time, waiting for the metabolic call to duty. That call comes from hormones-insulin, for example-and other chemicals. These chemicals escort the nutrients into the cells and tissues, where, broken down to their component parts, they help fuel the engines of life.

Eating involves not just internal processes but external ones as well. When we eat, we literally absorb part of the outside environment and incorporate it into ourselves. Eventually we return part of the meal to the environment and the process repeats itself. No wonder then that food, serving as a direct link to the “outside world,” can have such power over us! It’s not surprising that some people begin to use food and eating in abnormal ways, as weapons in the battle to gain control over their environment.

Eating behavior is partly biological, governed by the physical needs of the individual. It’s also partly social, determined by our interactions with other people. The way we think about food also affects the way we eat. For example, knowing that eating a candy bar at five o’clock could spoil her appetite for a big meal at six might affect a person’s choice whether to snack or not. Emotional factors also come into play; the sheer pleasure of tasting or smelling food can determine the content, timing, or size of our meals. Even though our bodies may not be sending hunger signals, the very presence of a scrumptious chocolate cake may make us want to eat.

Eating behavior, then, may occur in response to forces that have nothing to do with our bodies’ current nutritional needs. In treating the eating-disordered individual, there are two relevant questions to ask: “What biological abnormalities may be present?” and “Why have the non-biological factors that affect eating behavior come to dominate the biological factors?”

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At the tender age of 21, Dan Collins was so overweight and out of shape that his doctor feared he was killing himself.

“I was 5 foot 10′/2 and weighed 239 pounds,” he says. “I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, and my doctor was concerned enough to put me on medication.”

That was in 1984. Rather than sit back and let medications take control of his life, the young newspaper reporter from Towson, Maryland, embarked on a complete body makeover. He cut the salt in his diet way down, put the brakes on his runaway eating habits, and began walking and stationary cycling regularly.

Two years later, Dan had his blood pressure under control and was down to a lean 182 pounds. He felt and looked great but was afraid that he was entering an exercise slump. “I didn’t mind the walking and other exercises, but I really wanted a different kind of sport that I could really get into,” he says. “I knew that was important if I was going to keep the weight off for good.”

For Dan, that sport was fencing. While not as chic as aerobics a la Jane Fonda was in 1986, fencing really piqued his interest because it is both physically and mentally demanding. Working up a sweat was fun and exciting each time he picked up his foil and donned his mask and protective vest. “People don’t realize that a good fencer needs both aerobic and anaerobic conditioning as well as a sense of strategy and emotional control,” says Dan, who’s the co-founder of the Chesapeake Fencing Club of Baltimore.

While many others have piled up old, trendy sports gear in basements and attics over the years, Dan still fences every week, just like he’s been doing for the last 14 years. He also works out at home using a stationary bike and free weights to enhance his fencing performance. After all these years, it’s safe to say that this lean, mean fencing machine has found the perfect activity to help him keep the weight off.

WINNING ACTION

Go for the unusual and exotic. Learning how to move your body—and enjoy it—is personal. If you are having a hard time sticking with a workout regimen, try something uncommon or unconventional, like African dance, tai chi, or scuba-diving. Part of the journey of weight loss is discovering and uncovering the real you. Let your workouts be an expression of your inner self. If not now, when? Enjoy today!

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Some years ago I was invited to speak on a radio show with Lendon Smith, M.D., the famous pediatrician. Lendon spoke about caring for infants, while I talked about stress seekers, avoiders and handlers. Naturally, one of the callers we spoke with asked how a stress seeker can become a stress handler. That’s very difficult, I explained, because a stress seeker is like a race horse, straining against the reins to win every race. When they try to behave like stress handlers, they feel as if they’re chained to the starting gate, unable to run. Through my own experience, and that of many of my patients, I’ve found that many stress seekers cannot become stress handlers anymore than a race horse can be transformed into a turtle. But they can become reformed stress seekers.

The reformed stress seeker combines the stress seeker’s abundant energy and desire with the stress handler’s relaxed, friendly approach. I am a reformed stress seeker. I had to learn to recognize my own stress-seeking habits, how I was feeding on them and how they hurt me. Like any compulsive person, I must always work against my stress-seeking tendencies.

Reformed stress seekers love challenges but have learned what their limits are. They’ll tackle problems head-on, but if they can’t lick them without making themselves sick, they’ll either learn to live with it by changing their perceptions or walk away from the situation.

Lacking the stress handler’s instinctive recognition of stressful situations, the reformed stress seeker must pay careful attention to his or her life, carefully assessing feelings and the environment, “sniffing out” potential stress.

Most importantly, the reformed stress seeker must decide that health and happiness are too precious to risk on unnecessary battles.

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Another way in which exercise reduces your risk of suffering from coronary artery disease, and other diseases, is by protecting you against the dangers of excessive triglycerides. Triglycerides are the fats in your blood, and triglyceride levels rise when you eat foods containing fat. Ingesting alcohol and the refined carbohydrates found in cakes, pies, ice cream, candy, white-flour bread, pasta, etc., will also prompt a rise in your triglycerides. One of the problems with triglycerides is that they can help damage or plug arteries. If the triglycerides rise to very high levels, they can cause other diseases such as pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas). Pancreatitis may manifest itself as frequent episodes of upper abdominal pain. If it is severe enough it can lead to death.

We’re all familiar with a very common problem associated with excess triglycerides: the fat that accumulates on us as our body stuffs triglycerides into fat cells. The only sensible way to get them out is by exercise and diet. With vigorous exercise, the tryglycerides are pulled from the fat cells and broken down into free fatty acids, which the muscle cells can use for energy.

More serious, however, is the connection between fat and cancer. Everything you can do to keep your fat levels low— including exercise—is vitally important to avoid the killer cancers.

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% of Calories From Fat

Regular Milk 47

Low-Fat 30

Skim (Nonfat) 2

• As you can see, regular milk is high in fat. But because milk is such a good source of dietary calcium, I tell my patients to drink skim milk (if they have no intolerance to it).

• Many adults can’t drink milk because they have what is known as lactose intolerance. They lack an enzyme called lactase, which digests lactose (milk sugar).

• Cheese is made from milk. The type of milk used to make the cheese determines how fatty the cheese will be. Most common cheeses are made from regular milk. Because cheese has much less water than milk, the percent of calories from fat in cheese is much higher than in milk.

% of Calories From Fat

Cheddar 71

Swiss 67

Blue (Roquefort) 73

Parmesan 58

Cottage cheese, Creamed 35

• Hoop cheese (also know as farmer’s cheese) is a very low-fat cheese made from skim milk. It gets only about 3 percent of its calories from fat.

• If you like yogurt, eat the unsalted nonfat skim milk type. Or you can easily make your own nonfat yogurt.

• Dairy products provide no fiber.

• Here are some nonfat and low-fat cheeses:

Nonfat Cheeses

Ricotta (all skim milk)

Washed Cottage-Cheese Curd

Fromage Blanc (white cheese, French) Very Low-Fat Cheeses

Fromage Fort (Canquillote)

Gammelost (Blue Mold)

Bakers

Danish Export

Moderately Low-Fat Cheeses Feta (imported) Mozzerella Edam Danbo Tybo Jarlsburg

Farmers (German) Sap Sago St. Otho

Finnish Jack Parmesan Imported Swiss Neufchatel Port du Salut

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The immune system, however, is only one part of your “doctor within.” And the immune-system diseases, scary as they are, are only one type of disorder that may strike us. Millions of Americans are suffering from depression, unhappiness, anxiety, irritability and other emotional problems. Research is proving what we’ve suspected for years—that the thoughts you think have a profound impact on your physical health. And many of us have minds filled with the kind of unhappy thoughts that invite disease.

Recent studies have demonstrated the existence of physical and chemical links between the mind and the immune system. That connection, and the effect one has on the other, is sometimes called neuroimmunomodulation. That’s a fancy word for a simple concept. “Neuro” refers to the brain and its nerve attachments, “immuno” indicates the immune system and “modulation” points to the effect of one on the other.

Don’t worry about the ten-dollar words. The key point is that the brain greatly influences the levels of various chemicals throughout your body. Not enough of some chemicals, or too much of others, can incite all kinds of problems, including depression, heart attacks and even cancer. Your thoughts change your biochemistry, and your biochemistry affects your health and happiness. So it behooves us to keep our thoughts as happy and positive as we possibly can.

“I was fired last week,” said the young woman slumped in a chair. “My ad agency job depended on my making enthusiastic presentations of my ideas. I believe I have the talent, everyone says I do, but I just can’t seem to get going. I can’t get excited about anything anymore. I used to, all the time. In fact, people thought I was hyper. Now I’m like a blob; I just sit there all day. And I’ve been feeling sick for months. One thing after another.”

This woman was caught up in the cycle of depression, disease, more depression, more disease. Being unhappy made her sick; being sick made her unhappy. And each round left her sicker and more depressed. My examination and blood tests revealed that her immune system was off balance. Luckily she was able to implement my recommendations and lick the problem.

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Food intolerance, as it is presently understood, is anathema to this way of thinking. The range of symptoms claimed for it is vast. No two patients are alike, and there is no single symptom that is common to all. Different foods are at fault in different patients – and they cause different symptoms. Some patients are apparently sensitive to other things as well, such as house-dust mite or synthetic chemicals. There are no tests for food intolerance and no obvious physical signs – indeed, the patients often look well. To cap it all, there is no obvious mechanism.

As Dr William Bynum, a medical historian at the Wellcome Institute observes: ‘There is a general reluctance among the medical establishment to accept things that are non-specific and don’t always cause the same symptoms. It smacks too much of the old ideas of causation in medicine – cold weather was supposed to cause head-colds in some people and rheumatism in other people and so on. Causal thinking before the germ theory was extremely loose and it did not satisfy the usual canons of scientific explanation about cause and effect. There has been a strong reaction to that, and the problem with so-called food intolerance is that it goes against the grain of present-day thinking.’

Two other factors help to make food intolerance seem dubious. Many of the symptoms that are claimed for it are symptoms of a general type that can be caused in all sorts of different ways. Headache, for example, can be due to a bump on the head, anxiety, overwork, a brain tumour or a wild party the night before. What is more, many of the symptoms are those that can be produced by psychosomatic illness, in which emotional or mental distress evokes physical symptoms in the body. Both these factors make the phenomenon of food intolerance seem even less credible.

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Being in their right proportions, they will contribute all that our bodies require. Primitive peoples are more sensible than we are in this respect. They take their food just as it grows and prepare it very simply, thus preserving its nutritive value. Does that not give our ailing society cause to think on these things?

New drugs are being discovered every day, yet we do not see a decline in the overall incidence of disease. On the contrary, certain diseases are becoming more prevalent, especially those that are connected with the metabolism of the cells and the central nervous system. Among the most notable are cancer and multiple sclerosis. Yet those two diseases are practically unknown among the natives of various so-called ‘uncivilised’ areas of the world. It is noteworthy, then, that degenerative changes in the cells, as they occur in cancer and multiple sclerosis, are chiefly restricted to the people who live in ‘civilised societies’. Moreover, it is only in the industrial world that many infectious diseases are rampant, where refined food has weakened the people.

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Although curd packs and several other milk applications are well enough known, whey, the serum of the milk, is the form most frequently used in caring for the sick. Both sweet and sour whey contains most of the milk’s mineral nutrients, while cheese, which separates from the whey, is valued chiefly on account of its high protein and fat content. Enzymes, especially rennet used in the manufacture of cheese, doubtlessly play an important part in the therapeutic effects of whey. Milk itself is a wholefood, which implies that it contains all the necessary elements to sustain life. Among these elements are protein, fat, sugar, minerals and trace elements. So whey, the by-product of cheese manufacture, still has considerable nutritional value, actually much more than it was once thought to have. It is, therefore, of little wonder that in former times royalty and the famous from France and other countries made special journeys to Switzerland to take the world-renowned Swiss Whey Cures. Usually the visitors were afflicted with metabolic problems such as obesity, circulatory congestions, intestinal complaints, pancreatic insufficiency and flatulence. Whey cures also rectified conditions of dysbacteria, a complaint that is even more widespread today. Artificial preservatives and food additives, pesticide sprays etc., all contribute to the harm done to the body, which will have to put up a fight against them and their consequences.

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