Hundreds of thousands of the elderly watch enough health shows and surgery broadcasts to believe they’re almost qualified doctors themselves. With much casual medical knowledge easily available on the subject of what to eat, how to exercise, and how all the medicines on the pharmacy shelves work, some people can effortlessly end up with some pretty strong feelings on how to maintain the body, in a state of good health. Anyone who sees a self-styled health expert go on like this, invariably thinks of the following lines from Tom Sawyer: ” [Aunt Polly] was one of those people who are infatuated with patent medicines and all new-fangled methods of producing health or mending it. All the “rot” [the “Health” periodicals] contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up, and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and what frame of mind to keep one’s self in, and what sort of clothing to wear, was all gospel to her, and she never observed that her health-journals of the current month customarily upset everything they had recommended the month before.” Let’s look at a few of the health tips that the overenthusiastic get wrong all the time.
Eating healthy is wonderful, and important. But people love to get carried away with the dietary health tips. One rule they love is, “only eat raw organic foods”, because cooking destroys the “essentials” in foods. Some people love to save up all their money to spend on exotic small farm produce that’s carted over by a pony and Farmer Brown. In fact, “eating right” can so consume them, and take up all their energies, that they often have little time for anything else in life. Doctors actually feel that there is a kind of eating disorder associated with going too far with eating right. They call it orthorexia nervosa, and they feel it’s as serious as anorexia.