Can America ever get healthy?

There's good news and bad news. According to new statistics, health spending is flattening out for Medicare and Medicaid. This is attributed partly to the recession but also to changing behaviors of consumers. The second item is that the States are receiving less income from their “tobacco bonds”, a sign that Americans are smoking less. On the down side, obesity keeps growing, especially in the South. On my first trip to Atlanta we went in to a Krispy Kreme shop to give it a try. We found ourselves chatting with a customer who said he just came from a funeral. I'm not making this up but he said his friend was buried in a red, white and green Krispy Kreme casket. The donut tolls for thee. Medical expenses, hence the deficit, could be reduced greatly if we only made healthy lifestyle choices. Control your weight, exercise and eat nutritious foods. We're not Sweden but we don't have to be Mississippi either.

FILTHIEST HABIT IN AMERICA (Keep reading!) The internet is one big tease. You can’t get anything straightforward, only the come-on that a carnival barker would use, and that includes the CBS and NBC Nightly News. It’s a proven technique to coax readers into a story, but there’s really no reward in an item that starts: “What the star says”, “Bizarre cookbooks”; “Aniston’s ex moving on?” . AOL even has a daily section called “Weird News” with must-know items such as: “Octomom Broke”; “Grandmother 60 take up pole dancing” and “Watch: man attempts robbery with underwear over head”. Of course this is Dwight MacDonald’s grim world of Masscult which he described long ago as a page in Life magazine about the UN facing a page with a horse on roller skates. It’s the real world done as a comic strip. Now, dear reader, to satisfy your morbid curiosity about the headline. It comes from a Lil’ Abner strip of long ago when Dogpatch was horrified that someone in town had the filthiest habit in America. Al Capp played this for a few weeks until he revealed that the culprit wore the filthiest riding habit. It needed dry cleaning, that’s all. Gotcha!