The smell wafting from the fridge every time Christian or I opened the door was getting worse by the day.  We could no longer blame the dogs, or sock, or even the full kitchen trash can beside the sink.

No, it was definitely coming from the refrigerator in a way that was unfamiliar.  We are not prone to grow green-white fuzzy life forms so famous in the jokes.  Our refrigerator isn’t perfect, but it’s never so bad it smells either.

Tonight we couldn’t take it any longer so Christian and I brought out every single item; the bowl of leftover black bean and corn salsa and the container of shrimp, olive and bow tie pasta with goat cheese; the lone jalapeno pepper I bought for a recipe I never made, all the garlic, the jars of spaghetti sauce considered the prime suspect because if anything goes moldy in my refrigerator it is too many jars of spaghetti sauce opened for just one serving; the various small jars of Asian sauces I now know how to use thanks to Jianan from China who lives with us, and the carrots, the eggs and the mustards.  It all came out, got wiped down and stood in a counter top police lineup as we narrowed the search for the foul smell.

It was the Greek yogurt.  Somehow, something pierced the foil top as it made its way from the grocery store to the refrigerator shelf.  It was stinking to high heaven after one week.  Banished.

With the shelving all sprayed clean and the items returned and reorganized, I took a look at my evening masterpiece and declared the “ice box”, as my dad used to call it, healthy.

The U.S. Agriculture Department continues to revise the food pyramid, that long established guide to the proportion of various food groups we are supposed to eat for optimum health.  I must say we do pretty well at my place, although we can’t get past whole grain bread.  It overwhelms the taste of an otherwise great poached egg in the morning or sandwich at lunch time.  I feel like I’m eating cardboard that got soaked at high tide at the beach.  I stick with white.  And it sticks with me took for a couple of weeks in the refrigerator which should tell you about the ingredients they use to keep it “fresh” for that long.

So here is my refrigerator.  I score well in an abundance of fresh vegetables.  The jars of spaghetti sauce are for the convenience of Christian who sometimes gets a craving for pasta late at night.  My waistline could do without the two half gallons of half-and-half that I pour in my coffee.  A 4-year old could drink it with all the sugar and cream I put in, but at least I don’t eat fried food.  I’ll justify anything, won’t I?

________________________________________________________________

Jars of olives, pasta sauce, artichokes, sundried tomatoes, pesto, sriracha hot chili sauce, cream cheese, mayo, roasted red peppers; my basics that all end up in recipes.

_________________________________________________________________

Cilantro, scallions, mangoes, lettuce,carrots, celery, onions, garlic, cheeses and lots of limes and lemons.

My half-and-half, orange juice, milk, a million mustards, bag of homemade suet for the birds, horseradish and Asian sauces.

_________________________________________________________________

There’s balance in everything, including the daily reports of the scientific study of food.

On the heels of news that daily consumption of such vital goodies as bacon and processed meats like sausage and hot dogs creates a 42 percent increase in the risk of diabetes and heart attack there’s word of another study that says food supplemented with probiotics makes you healthier.

The Georgetown University School of Medicine with funding provided by the Dannon Company Inc.,  studied the impact of probiotic yogurt-like drinks on daycare children and found a marked reduction in common childhood illnesses.  It is the largest study of probiotic food ever performed in the U.S.

In the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study, considered the highest standard of research, 638 healthy children aged 3 to 6 who attended school five days per week were given a strawberry flavored yogurt-like drink each day.

Some of the drinks contained the beneficial bacteria lactobacillus casei, found in DanActive.  At the end of the study there was a startling 19 percent reduction in common illnesses such as upper respiratory tract infections, sinus and ear infections and strep throat among the kids who drank the probiotic.  In the case of gastrointestinal illness, the decrease was 24 percent.

Interestingly, the absentee rate at school did not change, indicating that even when children get sick they are often sent to school anyway, perhaps because working parents cannot take a sick day of their own to stay home and provide care.

Now if we could just blend the two outcomes of the studies mentioned on this blog.  Do you think there’s any way we can get some probiotics into hot dogs and bacon?

It sounds dreadful, but statistically the holidays see more heart attacks than any other time of the year.  Beginning with Thanksgiving, rising at Christmas and peaking around New Year’s Day, heart attacks and the holidays sadly go hand in hand.

Courtesy: freefoto.com

Doctors say there are many reasons for this.  First, many people ignore their symptoms which they chalk up to overeating and drinking; and second, they don’t want to interrupt the festivities with a trip to the emergency room.  Stressful family situations, the pressure to spend on gifts and travel, even the particulate from wood burning in the fireplace are all seasonal triggers for heart attack and stroke.  Cardiologists refer to this as the Merry Christmas Coronary.

The New York Times reports on a stunningly simple yet effective exercise that can predict the risk of heart attack in a person and even reverse the course.  It’s the ability to touch your toes.  You sit on the floor with your legs straight ahead of you, point your toes upward, bend from the hips and without bending your knees, touch your toes.  Apparently, a flexible body correlates to flexible arteries and the ease with which blood moves through them.  Rigid arteries require the heart to work harder.  Some older hearts can’t handle that strain.

The researchers did their work in Texas and in Japan and they found a direct link between flexible bodies and flexible arteries in men and women older than 40.  No such link was drawn from younger individuals.

It’s true that flexibility decreases with age, but some older folks maintain flexibility better than others.  The good news is we can all become more bendable with simple stretching.

The doctors don’t say that anyone unable to touch their toes is at sudden risk for a heart attack, but they do want anyone with chest discomfort, especially the next two weeks, to take their symptoms seriously and not postpone getting help.

In the meantime, sit down and see if you can touch your toes.  If you can’t, spend some time each day working on it.  Let’s avoid the Merry Christmas Coronary if we can.

If  you read health headlines on a regular basis, the title of this article is what your brain must reconcile.  Is organic food, with its strict regulations regarding pesticides and fertilizers better for you or not?

The results of a British investigation on the nutritional benefits of organic produce reveal organic food is no more beneficial than ordinary produce.  It sure is worse for your wallet, but the researchers didn’t study that.  They merely concluded from 50 years of nutritional studies “there were a small number of differences in nutrition between organic and conventionally produced food but not large enough enough to be of any public health relevance”.  Now what do we do?

Serve it up. Chemicals are fine by me

For all the oppressive regulation involving organic farming in the United States and the high cost to purchase this produce in the stores,  there was an expectation the trouble and expense were worth it.  Would you pay $.20 more per pound for bananas if it reduced your risk of cancer and other diseases?  Probably.   How about a seven dollar gallon of milk?  If you have a bunch of children chugging down cereal every morning, that habit might not leave enough for the electric bill.

Now, how about the price tag if there is no nutritional benefit?   And if people stop paying extra for organic, will farmers consider it worth the regulatory trouble? Already the recession is forcing some organic advocates to buy the ordinary stuff.

The study was commissioned by Britain’s Food Standards Agency and is in direct conflict with another study performed in that country less than two years ago.  In October of 2007,  a headline appeared in the newspaper Telegraph that read “Organic Food Better Than Ordinary Produce”.    This is what drives people crazy.

The current obsession with food studies goes back to the 1980s with the declaration that oat bran lowers cholesterol.  Food companies jumped on it and the American public, aware heart disease is the number one killer and high cholesterol is a culprit, went oat bran crazy.   Where oat bran was not added to cereals and baked goods at the plant, consumers sprinkled it at home like fairy dust with magical abilities.

And then the awful truth.  Several years later, follow up studies showed something else; oat bran as a substance doesn’t lower cholesterol, but it provides enough bulk in the stomach to prevent people from filling up on higher cholesterol foods.

Fast forward to the 21st century and the claim a daily glass of wine improves heart health.  That’s great, except a recent study said any amount of alcohol increases a woman’s risk of cancer.

The cure for all these conflicting studies?  Ignore them.  Eat what you want in moderation.  If you’re trying to lose weight, eat like a bird with depressingly few calories each day. Just make sure those calories involve plenty of vegetables, fruits and nuts, olive oil, wine and beans.

How do I know that?  A recent study on the benefits of the world’s healthiest diet, the Mediteranean diet, showed the five key components that provide the greatest health benefit are the ones I listed above.  Not the fish, not the yogurt as some long believed,  but those five.    That is, until the next study comes down the pike showing it’s really the fish and yogurt, and not that other stuff.

Due to some very bad news this week,  I will no longer consider hot dogs “processed meat”.  I will consider them delicious, which is my name for the food group with all the good stuff that’s bad for us.

Someone had the nerve to study 500,000 meat-eating men and women since 1995 and determine red and processed meat greatly increase the risk of dying from cancer and heart disease.  Kill-joys.  Heavy meat consumption increased this risk by 50 percent for women and 31 percent for men.  Therefore, since I have no intention of having cancer and heart disease, I will put myself in the other 50 percent of women who eat meat and get away with it.

I can live without red meat if I have to, having gradually weaned myself off the meat and potatoes diet on which I was raised.  But three or four times per year I do battle with my arteries with a home made hamburger, the way Friendly’s Restaurants used to make them; inside a grilled cheese sandwich.  Just fry a hamburg and set it aside while you make a classic grilled cheese sandwich.  As soon as the sandwich is done, pull apart the two pieces of toast and slip the hamburg inside the melted cheese.  Cut it in half and just watch the juice ooze out.  It is so good, those ten million calories.

Take away that piece of heaven if you must, but leave the hot dogs alone.  It’s the McCann family –my maiden name– default meal.  There is always a supply of hot dogs in the freezer and plenty of mustard in the fridge door.  Most times, I even have an onion on hand to chop. Voila.  Lunch.  Grilled, boiled, fried, from a street cart in Columbus Circle or New York City, every hot dog tastes great, but there are places where hot dogs are greatest.

With an honorable mention to Heid’s of Liverpool, the two best hot dog places in the whole world are Coney Island on Southbridge Street in downtown Worcester, and Hot Dog Annie’s in nearby Leicester.

Coney Island Hot Dogs, Worcester, MA

Coney Island looks like a dark and barren Depression-era Edward Hopper painting, only darker and more barren.  Nothing has changed since the 1930s and that includes the original tile floor and the varnished wooden booths carved up with the initials of people surely departed from this earth by now.

This landmark sign is from 1940

It’s as much as a museum as it is a restaurant.  When I was a teenager, I could get six hot dogs for a dollar.  They cost more today of course, but not much more.

Frozen in time

The second best hot dogs in the world are just a few miles away, at Hot Dog Annie’s on Paxton Street in Leicester, on the other side of the runway of the Worcester airport.  You drive along a scenic rural road, certain you are lost and boom, suddenly it’s there, the conga line of customers snaking out the door of a ramshackle old cottage that used to be someone’s modest home probably in the days of the Pilgrims.   The place has always been there for me.  People eat on the picnic tables among the trees, but it’s not very pretty.  I just get the hot dogs and go.

These places each offer their own version of barbecue sauce, or just “sauce” as they say, which never tastes like barbecue, thank goodness.  The sauce at Coney Island is predominantly ground beef with chili powder; at Hot Dog Annie’s it’s a sweet, warm onion relish.   I’m only guessing at the ingredients as both sauces are secret recipes, but suffice it to say these hot dog places and the obligatory “sauce”, are as much a Worcester institution as Holy Cross College, which means neither the college nor the hot dogs are going anywhere no matter how much tuition increases and how many studies link hot dogs to poor health.

Hot Dog Annie's, Leicester, MA

All my life, I used to beg my mother to stop smoking so she could live longer.  Her answer was always the same, “what good is a longer life without cigarettes?” , which I thought was absolutely crazy.  Well I am here to say I’ve turned into my mother.  Can anyone convince me that a longer life without hot dogs is worth it?

For more than a century anxious parents smeared Vicks VapoRub under the stuffy noses of their children.  The pungent blend of menthol, camphor and eucalyptus was considered a breakthrough during the 1918 influenza pandemic and it’s been selling ever since.

Now it turns out Vicks Vapo Rub may do more harm than good.  A recent study of the ointment on ferrets showed respiratory irritation, which may apply to humans too.  More work is needed to determine if Vick’s VapoRub should be pulled from the market, but for now, look for no changes in the marketing or sale of the product.
It’s just the latest of many items proven questionable or useless, but still selling.  I think the companies hope consumers aren’t watching the news.

Chondroiton and glucosamine are sold in supplement form to relieve the pain of osteoarthritis.  But now, evidence that this combination of cow cartilage and shellfish shells offers no more pain relief than placebo is mounting.  The pricey product Osteo-Biflex used to advertise chondroiton and glucosamine as it’s pain fighters.  Now you see 5-Loxin, whatever that is.  What happened to the chondroiton and glucosamine? You may not see it on the label of Osteo Biflex anymore, but you’ll have no problem finding it in many other vitamin products in the drug store.

Then there’s cough syrup.   Researchers at Pennsylvannia State University learned in a 2004 study that over-the-counter cough syrup is no more effective than placebo, and less effective than regular honey out of a jar.  Yet products with dextromethorphan and diphenhydramine are still selling, and worried parents who grew up with these products keep buying them for their kids. Nowhere in the store is there any information revealing the cough syrup does nothing to stop a cough.

The Food and Drug administration recalls products that are truly harmful to the public and Vicks may someday be on that list, but at this point there is nothing to protect the consumer from products that do nothing.