young-women-you've-

been-living-with's tales

Let's take this opportunity to briefly examine some of our most compelling beliefs about the body and its social role and physical functions. 

For instance, remember "feed a cold and starve a fever," "bread crusts make your hair curly," and how you get polio from using public drinking fountains? Those are old wives' tales. You never hear them anymore. What you hear now is young-women-you've-been-living-with's tales:

• The absolute worst thing for you in the whole wide world, worse than any, thing else, is commercial white bread.

• And the only thing worse than that is white sugar.

• In fact, anything white, such as white rice, is bad, while anything brown, such as brown rice, is good.

• The only white thing that's good for you is white wine, which is much healthier than beer or whiskey or even red wine.

• The only other white things that are good for you are fish and chicken, which are much better for you than beef, which is really bad for you unless it's veal, in which case it's sort of okay unless fried.

• In fact, fish is so good for you that it's almost like a vegetable.

• Smoking tobacco is really terrible, but smoking marijuana doesn't hurt you,

• Exercise is really good for you. The more vigorous the exercise, the better. But you shouldn't work too hard because work really wears you down.

• Cancer is a result of having a certain personality type that represses emotions and things.

• Only really square "business" types repress emotions. And our moms.

• Almost all the diseases we get are caused by the food we eat.

• Almost all the diseases we get are caused by the environment we live in.

• American eating habits are very, very unhealthy and Americans are very, very unhealthy, and even if the statistics do say that we live longer than almost everybody else in the world. Anyway, somewhere in the Andes in South America there are these people who live lots longer than we do and are super-healthy and that's because they only eat______ and_______ and never eat any _______ at all.

• All folk medicine works really well, especially Chinese folk medicine.

• Doctors don't know anything about medicine.

• It is more natural for a baby to be born in a geodesic houseboat in Sausalito than in a hospital in San Rafael.

• Children are really in touch with their bodies.

• Tea is better for you than coffee.

• Butter is awful for you, but milk and cheese and yogurt are good.

• Karate, Tai Chi, and Tae Kwon Do are good but fighting is bad.

• Women have more endurance than men.

• Shaving your legs or underarms is really barbaric but putting three holes in each ear is cool.

• The country is a really, healthy place to live, and if farmers and their wives and kids don't look really, healthy, it's because their heads are in a bad place.