What’s Old Is Now New. It’s Called Common Sense.

The results of a 35-year study about health are in. If you want to remain healthy, you need to “follow five simple rules—eat well, work out, drink less, keep [your] weight down and never smoke.”

It took 35 years to figure this out? We’ve always known that lifestyle, diet, exercise and not smoking enhance health. I wonder how much money was spent on this study over a 35-year period. Where was DOGE when you needed it? Who cares since it’s always fun to spend other people’s money for studying the obvious. These are the same people who can’t figure out that there are only two sexes. Let’s not forget the Food Pyramid where fat was bad, and low-fat carbohydrate-laden foods like pasta were good. Manufacturers started making low to no-fat foods like Snack Wells where sugar replaced fat. Can anyone say “diabetes”?

Thinking Straight in a Crooked World

The nursery rhyme “There Was a Crooked Man” is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.

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For nearly a century “physical culture” was a big part of our nation’s health history. Magazines, exercise equipment, and supplements have been sold by the millions. I knew this stuff when I was 12 years old, and I can assure you that’s more than 60 years ago.

Eugene Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture was established in 1898 and carried articles that covered the same “five simple rules.”

I could have given the same advice in a fifteen-minute interview for free, but then how would bureaucrats be able to justify their jobs?

Jack LaLanne, Charles Atlas, Joe Weider, Bob Hoffman and the York Barbell Company, and many others, even Jane Fonda, were preaching the benefits of exercise, diet, and moderation for decades, and it didn’t cost taxpayers a penny.

The ‘Jumping Jack’ was named after LaLanne. He was 96 when he died. He could do stuff like this:

“To commemorate the ‘Spirit of ‘76,’ United States Bicentennial, he swam one mile (1.6 km) in Long Beach Harbor. He was handcuffed and shackled, and he towed 13 boats (representing the 13 original colonies) containing 76 people.”

Let’s consider cigarettes. Cigarettes weren’t called “coffin nails” for more than a century because they were a good substitute for nailing shut coffins. Here’s a postcard from 1917.

In the seventeenth century, the noxious weed was relegated to the pits of hell by King James I in his “A Counterblaste to Tobacco” (1604).

He denounced smoking as “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

Without even reading the statistics about tobacco-related illnesses, a person knows that smoking cannot be good for the body. The first time a young person inhales, his body reacts by coughing. It’s a sure sign that the body is rejecting the harmful smoke. If inhalation persists despite the body’s early warning system, nausea takes over. Then there is the label on the side of every pack that states emphatically that you will probably get cancer if you keep smoking.

It doesn’t take a scientist, doctor, or a bureaucrat to know that eating well in moderation, physical activity including weight training, drinking less alcohol and sugar-laced drinks, weight control, and never smoking are common sense.

Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths

Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths takes a closer look at God’s Word and applies it to erroneous misinterpretations of the Bible that have resulted in a virtual shut-down of the church’s full-orbed mission in the world (Acts 20:27). Due to these mistaken interpretations and applications of popular Bible texts to contemporary issues, the Christian faith is being thrown out and trampled under foot by men (Matt. 5:13).

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American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources