Healthy and Green Living

I don’t know how your workday starts, but as a health journalist mine often begins with press releases and journal reports of the latest health research: Sometimes alarming, sometimes reassuring, often confusing. For years now, I have been sitting at my desk reading studies about what to eat, what to do and what not to do to stay healthy. That steady stream of research was the impetus for my first book, Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Probably Die From and What You Can Do About It. I had been hearing from readers, friends and relatives that the health news was confusing: One day coffee is bad for you; the next it’s not. How could the average person, someone with more to do than sit all day analyzing health news, make good decisions about their health? Because I watch this stuff on a regular basis (and as part of my job, call the researchers and ask them questions), I see trends and patterns where others often see contradictions. So I wrote Bullet, a guide to taking care of your health that distills the research into a simple message: What the current medical research actually says about how to take care of ourselves.

And it turned out the message really was simple. Sort of. But it is somewhat complex, too. The basics are still the basics: Eat well, get some exercise and don’t smoke. But beyond the basics it does get rather more interesting. The problem, I think, is not so much that taking care of ourselves isn’t simple. It really is. The problem is that living a simple, healthy life in our culture can be, well, complicated. For example, we recently learned that our drinking water is laced with drugs. So you make an effort to eat well, buy organic food and take care of yourself, but when you down a glass of water after your nice long walk in the woods, you’re knocking back trace amounts of someone else’s hormones and statins and antidepressants. What’s a health nut to do?

Over the past few years, as I have been digging into these issues, I have also learned that the health of our individual bodies is intimately connected with and in fact, is inseparable from both the health of the environment and the health of our society. My interest in health has merged with my love of the land and the beings with whom I share the planet. I have learned, am learning, that these are not two distinct agendas. While researching my forthcoming book on infectious disease, I have come to see that the notion of the interconnectedness of all things is not a way-out, hippie notion, but a concept that we must embrace if we are to continue to live here together in good health.

In this space, I will address the issue of taking care of our personal and collective health, how it can be quite simple if we insist that it be so. I’ll explore the concept of health and see where it takes us, and I’ll try to give suggestions and point the way to a more natural approach to protecting our health. For example, I’ll dig around, bug a few experts and see if I can find out what we need to be doing about the drugs in the water (which threaten not only us, but affect all of life including microscopic life). I will continue to analyze the research, but I will also take a broader perspective as I look at the science behind good health. I am learning that there is more to taking care of ourselves than crunching the data on the latest clinical trial.

I hope you will enjoy this blog. Let me know your opinions, ideas, and questions. Together we can make staying healthy a simple and exciting adventure.

Avery Hurt is a health and science journalist. Her work appears regularly in national publications such as: Better Homes and Gardens, Newsweek, and The New Physician. She is author of Bullet With Your Name On It: What You Will Probably Die From And What You Can Do About It (Clerisy Press, 2007) and Don’t Worry, I’m Not Contagious: Your Guide to Staying Healthy in an Infectious World, due out from Clerisy, fall 2008. She is at work on her third book, on alternative medicine.