LIVING FEATURE  Visualize the home of the American Dream: a single-family house in a nice neighborhood, a broad expanse of green lawn, perhaps a garden, and maybe even a white picket fence. The grass in that lawn might be green in color, but chances are good that it’s far from environmentally friendly. The culturally ideal suburban lawn is an unnatural monoculture, in agricultural terms — a small-scale version of the endless corn and soybean fields of the American Midwest. Read More>>

NEWS  There’s no doubt about it — salt tastes good. A sprinkle of plain old table salt (aka sodium chloride) perks up the taste buds and truly enhances the flavors in food.

    Salt is also critical to our body chemistry: A certain level of sodium is necessary for the correct function of nerves and muscles. The minimum daily sodium intake to maintain these functions is somewhere between 500 and 1,500 milligrams per day. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  Costs are up, jobs are down, and the headlines are filled with news of strife and economic uncertainty. It’s enough to make anyone feel stressed.

Stress isn’t just an annoyance; it’s a significant contributor to many major health problems — obvious ones, like heart disease and hypertension, and less obvious conditions including autoimmune disorders and cancer. Read More>>

PEOPLE  George Thompson can tell you exactly how long it’s been since his last recurrence of cancer: “It was 55 months ago. But who’s counting?” Read More>>

NEWS  When Kammy and John Doerschlag’s second son, Joey, was born in 2005, they had a happy, healthy infant — for a day. By Day Two, they began to see changes, especially when Joey was breastfeeding. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  The cuisine of India is a colorful, flavorful delight, filled with vegetables and redolent with aromatic spices and hot chilies. Pungent curries are among the best-known dishes, and here in the United States we tend to think of curry as a single flavoring, thanks to the marketing of a rather bland (by comparison) product known as curry powder. But in India, you’d be hard pressed to find curry powder: Every good cook has her own tin filled with individual spices and herbs — coriander and fennel seed, cumin and black mustard seed, cinnamon and cardamom — and these spices are blended differently into each dish. Read More>>

NEWS  Turns out that Mom really did know what’s good for you and what’s not. All those dictums of childhood — go outside to play, get enough sleep, clean your room and indulge in the occasional treat — are now coming full circle. Sleep, laughter, sunshine, clean spaces and tasty treats can deliver health benefits. Common sense and moderation are good guides, but there is plenty of room for joy in a healthy lifestyle. Read More>>

NEWS  I had to rummage through piles of books stacked in front of my bookshelves to locate my books about organizing and clearing clutter. (Writers love irony.) Read More>>

NEWS  In the 1973 film Sleeper, Woody Allen’s character awakens after 200 years to find that everything he thought he knew about healthy food had changed: Wheat germ and organic honey are out, steak and hot fudge are in.
Today, 35 years after the film’s debut, we’ve heard enough contradictory dietary advice to have developed a collective case of what is sometimes called the Sleeper Syndrome — uncertainty in the light of rapidly changing food knowledge. Read More>>

NEWS  Turns out that Mom really did know what’s good for you and what’s not. All those dictums of childhood — go outside to play, get enough sleep, clean your room and indulge in the occasional treat — are now coming full circle. Sleep, laughter, sunshine, clean spaces and tasty treats can deliver health benefits. Common sense and moderation are good guides, but there is plenty of room for joy in a healthy lifestyle. Read More>>