So how was your weekend?

It rained here. My wife tells me it rains here every year at this time, and I just don’t seem to remember that. I don’t remember a lot of stuff.

Every Memorial Day weekend I attempt to smoke a large hunk of meat for dinner. That is, I haul out an electric smokehouse and set a beef brisket inside it and let it smoke for the better part of the day. It’s something I’m trying to establish as a tradition, just so my kids will have something to laugh about amongst themselves and share to their children and grandchildren later on in their lives. So far, so good; I’ve provided plenty of fodder for laughter.

Last Thursday my wife was diagnosed with pneumonia. She’s pretty much been coughing non-stop for two weeks now, the poor thing.

But this of course means she’s out of action, and I am left alone with only a lethargic older sister to help care for Michael, who was beyond wild for the last three days.

I’m not sure what’s in his rice milk, but the kind of energy he’d been sporting could easily allow him to leap into a low Earth orbit if he so desired. He’s been up at around 6:30 every day, rarin’ to go and making demands.

In an effort to help curb her coughing, Sunday night my wife tried sleeping on the couch so she could sit upright. The cat did her level best to ensure that sleep was not to be had, coming in from outside and applying her damp fur to our faces and tromping around on our midsections every thirty minutes. And of course she ignored the very active and loud mouse that was scurrying around under the stove (we think she figures she’s made her quota of critter control by bringing two birds into the house last week, so she should be exempt from mouse duty). And as kitty and mouse settle down to relax after a hard night of keeping the people awake, Michael clocks in at around 5:45 AM and begins his shift, climbing up on his mom’s face and demanding Reese’s Puffs.

Yesterday I’d had enough of his tearing around like a Jack Russel Terrier on his fourth espresso and bribed his sister into taking him to the park for a little while. The clouds had been spotty at best and it was dry all morning, with very little wind.

I drove them to the park and told his sister to call me when they were ready to be picked up. Then I headed home in peace. The first peace I’d had for days.

As I pulled into the driveway, the clouds burst forth in a torrent.

“It’ll pass,” I told myself. “It can’t last long.”

I had barely gotten into the house when the call came: Michael says it’s too wet to play, and he wants to come home.

Sigh.

To add to the fun, my wireless router upped and died on me, forcing me to buy a new one. I had a Linksys router before, a real solid system that just plain worked from the time I first plugged it in until the time it sputtered its last packet. It was easy to set up, easy to use, and came with a nice interface that stayed out of my way until I needed it.

Then I bought this Belkin “Play” router, and was taken in by the hype of “just plug it in and you’re ready to go!”

Not so much.

The bottom line is, the Belkin wireless router is a diva. It demands constant attention, and will spontaneously go into sulk mode and drop the internet connection if it becomes offended for any reason. You have to gently, carefully coax it back into service. It also has a feature in which it automatically restarts, on schedule. I think it’s the equivalent of a “spa day”, because it’s out of commission for forty-five minutes during this time, and it’s going to happen whether you like it or not. Trying to set up a wireless connection was impossible. I know, it’s a wireless router and all, but there’s obviously more to it than just having another wireless system nearby and using the same security protocol and all that. No, there’s a pin involved, and timeouts, and security checks, and registrars, and handshaking, and synchronization, and antidisestablishmentarianism… anyway, like a true paranoid-schizophrenic, this Belkin wireless router would refuse to acknowledge any such capability as routing things wirelessly.

This morning I have carefully sealed the Belkin Play router back into it’s snug little box along with the cables, disk and power supply for its return to Costco. It went without a fight, but I believe it must have angered the modem during its two-day tenure, as the modem now refuses to connect to the internet.

By this morning, I can report that Michael’s mom is recovering, thank God, since she’s scheduled to be at work tomorrow. She got some new cough medicine and actually slept all night long last night, in our room, away from creatures. And Michael didn’t get up until after I’d gotten dressed and was ready for him.

So… I’m glad the weekend is over. Thank God for the men and women who’ve given their lives for their country, so we can be free. I don’t think we observed this fact much this weekend. I had my own battles at home to deal with.

A few days after Christmas of 2008, Michael’s Mommy suffered a heart attack. By the grace of God, she lives to tell the tale. As a continual reminder of how your diet can affect your body, we here at Being Michael’s Daddy have declared the last Monday of the month to be “Myocardial Monday.” Here we’ll offer information about food and nutrition in hopes that it will help others avoid facing what could be a fatal condition. Yes, I know it’s not the last Monday of the month. I’ve been busy.

Today we’re going to explore a buzzword that seems to be one of the latest health concerns: inflammation.

What is inflammation?

Inflammation is a swell thing.

Actually, in many cases, it isn’t so swell.

Inflammation is your body’s response to injury: It’s sending in the cavalry. White blood cells are sent to an area where there’s an injury in the body. In some cases, you can see or feel the inflammation: sinus problems, arthritis, a welt on the hand, swelling from a bee sting. These white blood cells arrive at the scene, and move in, doing their work in preventing infection and releasing chemicals that fix things up.

So what? A little bump or a stuffy nose. What’s the big deal?

The problem occurs when there are inflammatory actions in blood vessels. When the inside of a blood vessel becomes inflamed, the swelling that occurs impacts the flow of blood through the vessel.

Imagine a busy street downtown mid day. A pot hole appears out of nowhere, and workers are dispatched to fix it up. What are they going to do? Shut down at least one lane of traffic. Now you have a traffic jam. Let’s hope the pothole doesn’t get any bigger, or they’ll have to close down two lanes – or worse – the whole street. And if so, let’s hope that street doesn’t lead to something vital, like, say, your heart. Or your brain. That would be the start of a really bad day.

Yikes, that’s horrible!

Oh, but it gets worse.

The injured areas inside blood vessels tend to snag LDL cholesterol that’s gliding along in the blood. As these little fat globs collect, they oxidize and explode, then build up and calcify, turning into plaque which then gets covered over with a layer of asphalt – err, scar tissue. This alone is enough to completely close off a vessel. And there’s your heart attack, embolism or stroke.

Isn’t there some way to roto-rooter them off?

You wouldn’t want that. If one of these little plaque bombs gets dislodged, it goes floating on down your blood stream in one big clump until it gets to a vessel it can’t squeeze through – which will cause a heart attack, embolism or stroke.

Hold on – ibuprofen reduces inflammation. Can’t I just take that?

For the occasional headache or muscle ache, yes. But not for this. Popping NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatories) every day will actually have the opposite effect, as it interferes with your body’s ability to control its inflammatory response, which will ultimately make matters worse.

And it doesn’t stop there.

There are studies that link chronic inflammation with development of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and a whole slew of health problems.

Take a look:

I’m doomed.

Now, now. Let us not abandon hope. I wouldn’t have brought you this far without offering the lifeline.

One of the best things you can do to fight the inflammation is adjust your lifestyle.

Eating the rights foods: Get plenty of Omega 3’s, like those in Salmon and cold water fish, flaxseed and walnuts; fiber in whole grains and fresh fruit; antioxidants found in fresh grapes, blueberries, broccoli and soy products. I’ve discussed Omega 3’s and fiber in past Myocardial Monday posts. I’ll get to the purpose of antioxidants in a future post.

Stay away from sugar, particularly high fructose corn syrup and white refined sugar. Not because they’re so horrible in and of themselves, but because they’re so easily absorbed and bring nothing with them to help the body deal with them.

Sugar? What’s that got to do with inflammation?

Glad you asked. But you’ll have to wait until next time, when I discuss Type II Diabetes, and the horror that is sugar.

Studies indicate that turmeric may prove helpful in preventing buildup of atherosclerosis, or blocked arteries. It lowers LDL and inhibits its oxidation, which is good: oxidized LDL is what sticks to artery walls and causes blockage. By the way, it’s pronounced “TER – mer – ick”, not “TOO – mer – ick”. But whatever.

Inflammation may sound like a fairly innocuous issue, but being aware of it is critical. While it is a normal body process, when it gets out of control it can cause all kinds of problems. Just a few little adjustments can make a huge difference in the length and quality of your life.

I had a big to-do list this last weekend. I had every intention of taking down all of the Christmas decorations and packing them up. My wife and I had some shopping to do, as we both had gift cards on the verge of expiration. I had intended to make pizza dough, which requires getting an early start. I had a blog post that I was late putting up. Lots to do.

And as I lay there, staring up at the ceiling of room 43 in the emergency department of the hospital, I thought about how at this point I’d be happy just to be home.

My wife was right next to me, holding my hand, being soothing, but occasionally reminding me how much I’d scared her earlier.

It all began the week before. I’d called my doctor to schedule an appointment to follow up on my blood pressure medication. While I talked with him, I brought up another unpleasant medical issue, one that a lot of men face when they start getting on in years. While I did not relish the thought of the exam that would be necessary, I did hold out hope for a long term solution.

At the end of my exam my doctor prescribed a new medication.

“It’s an alpha blocker. Should help with your blood pressure too,” he said, cheerily. That’s good news, I thought. Anything that helps get my blood pressure down sounds good to me. Before I left he gave me the usual admonition to get out there and exercise, and check into the Mediterranean Diet for help with my nutritional intake. He’s very encouraging when it comes to being healthy, starting with diet and exercise. Gotta like that approach.

My wife picked up my new medicine on Friday. It’s a cute little periwinkle pill. “It might make him sleepy,” the pharmacist said, “so be sure he takes it at night before bed time.”

Sleepy. I always prefer sleepy when it’s bed time. They go together well.

After taking the aforementioned little periwinkle pill and climbing in to bed, I relaxed… but soon noticed that I wasn’t all that sleepy. In fact, my heart was pounding a little.

But I eventually drifted off, and slept well.

My wife and I woke at nearly seven-thirty Saturday morning. I felt great.

“We slept in!” My wife observed happily. “To some, seven-thirty is the crack of dawn. For us, it’s sleeping in,” she went on. We both laughed at the thought.

Our conversation turned to other topics, and I got up to use the bathroom. I was standing there, listening to my wife’s thoughts about the academic situation we’re facing with one of our teenagers, when suddenly things changed.

The world started getting dark. It was as if someone were lowering the shades on my eyes.

My heart gave a couple of plaintive skips, usually a precursor to arrhythmia.

“Oh, shoot,” I said. ”This isn’t good.” The thought of “I need to sit down” had almost finished crossing my mind…

Dreaming: something urgent and incomprehensible…

Now I hear a loud snore, one that I recognize as my own.

My wife is screaming. “I’m calling 9-1-1! Tom! Can you hear me?”

I realize that I’m waking up, but I’m not in bed. There is lots of pain. I am curled up against the bathtub, staring at the Easter Island Tiki head planter that’s now lying in the tub, along with every other tropical-themed knick-knack we had set up along the edge of the tub.

“Wha?” I slur.

“YOU PASSED OUT! I’M CALLING 9-1-1!”

“I did? Why? Where am I?” Stupid question, and so cliché. But honestly, I couldn’t be sure of much at the moment.

Little by little I did regain my faculties and with her help clambered to my feet. She helped me out of the bathroom and to the bed.

“We’re going to the hospital. Let me get S up so she can take care of Michael,” she said. While she was gone I reconstructed what must have happened: when I stood up to go to the bathroom, I must have fainted.

Ladies and gentlemen, this guy does not faint. I have never fainted in my life. I have been through three births and two weddings. My entryway into sleep has always been one of choice and comfort.

So… off to the hospital we go. My wife is concerned that there may be more going on that just a reaction to the medication, and because I’d struck my head a good one, she was more than a little worried that I might have a brain bleed or something.

The scans and tests and everything came back fine; no clots, no brain bleeds, no abnormal med levels, normal sinus heart rhythm, all that. Doc handed down a diagnosis of “vasovagal syncope” – which is a fancy way of saying that I fainted. He added something else that was news to me: when you urinate, your blood pressure drops. In my case, it was fast and severe – enough for me to lose consciousness.

Didn’t know that. Would have been nice to have read that on the medication fact sheet, had that little tidbit been there.

I had plenty of time to ruminate while we waited for the “all clear to leave.”

I’ve been a guest of this hospital too many times. For heart arrhythmia episodes, back surgeries, and now this. I shouldn’t be a frequent flyer here, I’m only 46. Inside I still feel like a dorky kid, one who’s been around for a few years.

But most of the time my body feels like that of an old man: tired, pale, weak. I remind myself of a doddering codger, ashen grey and scarcely able to stand, let alone walk.

I know it shouldn’t be this way.

And I know that the one thing that contributes to all of these problems, and so many others, is something I have full control over: my weight.

I am too fat.

It’s that simple.

And I have had enough of it.

What makes it worse is that I know better. My wife had a heart attack just a little over a year ago, but apparently I haven’t absorbed that fact deeply enough to truly change my own behavior, which largely consists of too much junk food and not enough healthy; too much sitting and not enough moving.

It is up to me to change. I have to, because my wife and kids need me. I have the will, and I have the motivation right now. I pray to God that it’ll stick this time.

That old saying “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” always bugged me. But it’s suitable, and I’ll claim it. Today is the first day of turning the ship around, heading toward “health” and ordering all engines full.

Yesterday marked one year since my wife had her heart attack. She and I rang in the new year in her hospital room, toasting with sparkling pear juice after a dinner of home made chicken noodle soup (her favorite).

I’ve been ruminating about that, and how far we’ve come since then.

On the plus side, it precipitated some positive changes in our life.

We quit doing dessert every night: no more cream pies or ice cream. Instead, we have home made apple crisp from time to time.

We are eating more vegetables. Our dinners (and lunches) are more geared around the salad, choosing appropriate sides and proteins to go along with it. We’ve incorporated some new recipes into our regular dinner choice rotation, including ratatouille (made the way Remi the rat does in the Pixar movie of the same name). At least three times a week our breakfast is hot cereal consisting of toasted oatmeal, quinoa, flax seed and walnuts. And on those weekends we have pancakes or waffles, they’re made with whole wheat flour and flax seed meal.

We bought a series of books called “Eat This, Not That” which opened our eyes to the reality of nutrition, and how small changes can make a huge impact without forcing impossible expectations or unreasonable diet restrictions. For example, reading the nutrition labels on packaged foods can reveal how much high fructose corn syrup is in nearly every processed food you buy, including bread.

Still, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

One of the things my wife and I both struggle with is will power, and remaining fixed on our health goal.

We both are prone to “falling off the wagon” when it comes to food, particularly when that food is chocolate. Or at least partly chocolate. Carbohydrates are yummy, it’s an inescapable fact. We both like food, and don’t do well with portion control. Being hungry after eating the proper amount of calories means that at some point, we’re going to want to eat more calories.

And of course we need to get up and move more; get out and exercise. We have had spurts of activity, where we’ll go for a half-hour walk every night for a few weeks… but then we start slacking off, and pretty soon we’re not walking at all.

We now have a Wii Fit Plus, which is phenomenally motivating for getting us up and moving. It keeps track of your weight and body mass index, allows you to set goals and provides enough nagging to keep us going. I swear it said “oof” the first time I stood on that board. And I was very sad to see my little “Mii” character balloon up to walrus size once it calculated my BMI.

The games and training found in Wii Fit Plus are all aerobic activities, and they’re all very addictive – I find myself looking forward to practicing Kung Fu moves, jogging along with a kitty cat, throwing a Frisbee to a dog on the beach or doing the step aerobic dances. My wife is getting to be a grand champion hula-hooper.

We keep our eyes on the objective of being healthier, thinner, and more energetic in 2010. We’ll keep up with our diet changes and make further improvements. We’ll be moving more and eating less.

As I keep telling my wife: “We have to reach old age together. I’ve got plans for you.”

Or, the virtual dumping of the junk drawer onto the clear surface that is my blog.

There’s actually not much to write about lately; it’s sad.

Michael still asks fifteen gazillion questions every day, questions about everything and anything and nothing, questions that have no logical answer, questions that make no sense, questions to which only he knows the answer, questions about questions.

His entire day is one gigantic question mark. From dawn until dusk. When his feet hit the ground, he revs up the question engine, and it does not cease until daddy has firmly ensconced him in his bed.

I’ve written about this before, fairly recently, so there’s no need to cover that ground again. Suffice it to say, it hasn’t let up. It’s only increased in ferocity and quantity. He’s added “What happens when I…” to his repertoire, though. That’s new. Like if the topic of conversation deals with jello melting, he’ll ask “What happens when I melt?” Or if we’re discussing mowing the lawn, he’ll ask “What happens when I get mowed?”

Moving on.

He ended his two-year stint on anti-seizure medication just a couple of months ago. He took his last dose one Sunday night, and that was it. We were prepared with emergency anti-seizure medication, just in case he had an episode… but it never happened. He’s been completely free of any myoclonic spasms, and has shown no other signs of medication withdrawal. At the end of next month we can pretty much rest assured that he’ll be okay from now on. Closing that chapter.

————

Yesterday, on the way out of his drop-in day care, we happened to pass by a classmate. A “pretty girl,” he called her. I asked what her name was, but he didn’t know. She was chatting with her mom, telling of her adventures that day. He turned around to say something; I assumed he was going to ask her name.

Instead, he said “Your dress is… I love your… I… I… I love you.”

She giggled.

“Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you?” I said. Her mom laughed.

“Daddy!” he said.

“I think you’re just cute,” the pretty girl said.

“Oh, no!” Michael said, giving himself a face-palm. The girl giggled all the way back to her mom’s car.

—————-

In a short while, Michael will be starting school in another in-home day care place this year, one that comes highly recommended as providing structure, individual attention and real learning targeted to Michael’s age group. He’s already visited and is very excited about going. We’re excited to see him learn and grow this year, and hopefully move into a phase that goes beyond asking random questions and demanding to watch movies endlessly.

Summer is coming to an end. Three teenage girls will be going back to school. One will be starting high school, and will be in for a real culture shock, going from a routine of getting up at eleven AM to getting up at six, and then having to actually use her head for more than just as a place to perch her headphones.

It all began in early 2007, when Michael’s Mommy noticed something strange going on. Every so often, Michael would twitch inexplicably in a manner that was similar to what someone does when they’re startled. He did this throughout the day at random intervals, and it went on for several weeks.

She contacted the doctor and explained her discovery, but he dismissed it, basically saying it’s probably nothing.

But Michael’s Mommy knew there was more to this. She was determined to show them what she meant.

So one day she set up the video camera, and caught this (it happens at about 22 seconds in, and it’s rather subtle):

She emailed this video to the doctor, who did a complete about face on his earlier opinion, and suggested we send a copy of that video to a neurologist, which we did.

A few days later, Michael had an appointment for an EEG.

All of this is documented here in a post from March of 2007.

As a result of the EEG that Michael had, he was put on Depakote, with the hopes that it would help his brain grow out of that particular brand of seizure, and prevent it from developing into full blown epilepsy.

Every single day for the last two years, we’ve had to give Michael two daily doses of this medicine. It comes as a capsule, but because he’s too young to swallow such a pill, we have to take the thing apart and sprinkle it on something. Ice Cream. Yogurt. Pudding. Whatever substrate we can find to hide it in and spoon it into his mouth. And he’s always been really good about taking it, which made things a heck of a lot easier.

Just last week, we had the two-year follow up EEG. It was what they call a “sleep deprived test.” That is, Michael had to stay up until 10:30 the night before, and then be awakened at 5:30 the next morning. It was just as much fun as it sounds. Here are two groggy parents schlepping into the hospital with one little Energizer Bunny who’s bouncing around like he’s been given a bolus of caffeinated sucrose. Needless to say, he handles sleep deprivation a whole lot different than either his mom or I do.

I won’t bore you with a lot of details, except for one little slice of the experience: The technician who was doing the procedure asked if we could have Michael lie down, close his eyes and hold still for ten minutes. Was she serious? If I’d had my wits about me, I would have asked her if she’s ever actually seen a five-year-old boy.

All in all, the thirty-minute test went well. Michael behaved himself just fine and they got the info they wanted.

The best part of it came two days later, when the doctor’s office called and told us that his EEG was normal, and that our next step would be to start weaning him off the Depakote, so that in just a few weeks, he’ll never need that medicine again.

So I’m using this space to issue a HUGE thank-you to my wife, who had the instinct to notice something was wrong, and the persistence to keep pushing the issue forward until she was heard by the professionals. As a result, Michael will live a normal life, as if it had never happened.

High Fructose Corn Syrup

Last week, Nonna asked about this, and rather than give the topic short shrift, I figured I’d cover it with heaping mounds of verbiage and ridiculous detail. So if you’re ready to learn, here we go:

What is it?
HFCS is a sweetener made from corn. It sounds strange; how do you make something sweet from corn, without it tasting like corn? It’s actually pretty simple.

Corn is mostly starch, and starch is just sugar wearing a fake nose and glasses. It only takes a bit of a nudge to turn the corn starch into the sweet stuff.

On a side note, “sugar” itself isn’t just one thing, but is the all-encompassing name for a group of similar molecules (“saccharides”) that taste sweet: fructose, glucose, lactose, maltose and a ton of other oses. Fructose is the sugar primarily found in fruits, lactose is the sugar that is in milk, and glucose is the sugar that your brain needs to function. That white crystal stuff that’s sitting in your sugar bowl is actually a double whammy (a “disaccharide”) of two sugars linked together: fructose and glucose. In this form it’s called “sucrose” – or table sugar.

Starch is what’s known to the chemistry geeks as a “polysaccharide”, or a big long chain of sugars. Think of it as a necklace made out of little sugar beads all strung together. To turn this pasty molecular chain into something yummy, the starch is “hydrolyzed” (this is the technical term for bonking something with water molecules) and the chain is effectively blasted apart. Before all the little beads end up clattering all over the floor of the Petri dish, they grab the hydrogen/oxygen pairs of the water molecules and change their name to glucose. Now, it’s sugar.

Then, to make it “go to eleven”, chemists take the resultant sugary goop and run it by some chemical workers called enzymes to force some of the glucose into becoming fructose. Thus, the corn syrup becomes richer in fructose, making it “high fructose” corn syrup. Get it?

Here’s a good place to note that your body can do this hydrolyzation thing without even breaking a sweat. This is why starchy food like potatoes and bread can really mess with your blood sugar level; the starches are converted into sugars by your digestive process.

Why is it in everything?
Not only can it make things taste better, it’s used to add volume, make bread softer, preserve food, assist with product fluid consistency and bump up calorie count. It’s the wonder additive that can work wonders. Better living through Science! Yup.

Why HFCS and not sugar?
HFCS is cheap. A whole lot cheaper that sugar. Why, you ask? Especially when sugar comes naturally and HFCS has to be made chemically? For that answer, you have to set the wayback machine to a few decades ago, and take a hard look at what our friends at Archer Daniels Midland have done. I won’t go into great detail here (you can read about it yourself), but suffice it to say that ADM (“Supermarket to the World”) lobbied the government to keep sugar prices high and make corn subsidies plentiful. They played games with the market so they’d come out ahead and could sell their uber-cheap HFCS to anyone who wanted it. And food manufacturers flocked to their door.

Is High Fructose Corn Syrup bad?
No, not on its own. It’s no worse than any other natural sweetener. It’s not going to destroy your liver or turn your skin into jelly, give you lyme disease, chronic fatigue, pigeon toes, rot your bowels or cause you to break out in weeping ulcers. It’s just sugar. The problem isn’t the stuff itself, it’s the abundance of the stuff.

It’s very hard to find any processed food that doesn’t contain HFCS. Go to the supermarket and read the ingredient labels on the foods you buy and you’ll see what I mean.

The HFCS promoters say “It’s fine in moderation.” Well, sure it is. But I challenge anyone to go through a day of normal eating given a typical American diet and end up having consumed HFCS in moderation. That’s like standing out in the rain all day and being told you’ll only get a little moist.

What to do about it?
Don’t stand in the rain. The food manufacturers have to provide an ingredients list, so take advantage of that fact. Stick to things that don’t use HFCS if at all possible. You’ll get enough sugar in the fruits and grains and starchy foods you eat.

It’s really not that hard, and you can actually lose weight without knocking a crumb of food out of your daily intake.

I was scrounging through the thesaurus I keep right here hoping to find an “m” word for “healthy”, but came out of it quite disappointed. Michael’s mommy, ever the bright one, suggested for this weekly segment the title you see here. Alliteration is good. Having it make some sense is even better.

Today I’m going to rave about the wonderfulness of a series of books my wife and I discovered fairly recently.

Eat This, Not That gives the real scoop on nutrition, and presents it in a way that enlightens and entertains without making the reader feel guilty.

There are three books in the series. The first gives a general overview of the whole concept, the second deals strictly with successful navigation of the supermarket, and the third targets kids’ foods.

The author names names and pulls no punches in delivering the dirt on products you’ll find all over, how much nutrition they contain, and more aptly, how much non-nutrition they contain.

He compares similar products from different brands/franchises, giving the reader a way to make a smart choice.

The basic idea is that the food industry has taken over our lives, and is surreptitiously manipulating our taste buds to want things sweeter, saltier and more fat-laden than we would naturally. It’s amazing to find out how High Fructose Corn Syrup has made its way into nearly everything you buy at the grocery store, and how even foods that have the outward appearance of being healthy have been altered and processed to the point where they’re no better than the “unhealthy” version of the same thing.

Since reading these books, we’ve learned that there are a few very simple rules to follow when shopping that will save us hundreds of calories every day without having to sacrifice our wants, without forcing us to count calories or measure portion sizes, and it pretty much guarantees weight loss.

This isn’t to say that he’s advocating a particular diet as much as he promotes “wising up” of the shopper to make better food choices to maximize nutrition and minimize empty, useless caloric intake.

If you’re at all interested in making even the smallest positive change in your eating habits, I highly recommend the “Eat This, Not That” series.

Slowly but surely, we’re getting on with our new life.

Michael’s mommy is recovering. Her new medications may be helping the crucial problem of fending off plaque buildup in her arteries, but they’re also making her feel like she’s got a bad case of restless leg stomach flu. With a side of insomnia.

Meanwhile, we’re scouring the metro area looking for actual food.

Let me explain.

One of the things we have learned, as a result of this surprise, is that our biggest enemy in the fight for health is the food supply. And not just from restaurants, but from the supermarket. If you’re not extremely careful and wise in your selections, you will load your grocery cart up with more calories than you’ll ever need, and less nutrition than you’d believe.

Even things promising a “healthy” option aren’t necessarily so, since nearly every pre-packaged, processed food is overrun with High Fructose Corn Syrup, sodium and myriad unpronounceable, mysterious additives.

And restaurants have their part in the comestible chaos that reigns out there. Portion sizes are the biggest problem. Since the 1970s, portions have nearly doubled. And not just with the food, with the sugar-drenched drinks as well. Remember when a large soft drink at McDonald’s was about 20 ounces? Between then and now, it swelled up to 42 ounces. Yikes.

All this to say we’ve discovered that the deck was stacked against us. We’re thwarted at every turn.

But we’ve learned our lesson. Our eyes are wide open now, and we know where to steer to find the things that are proper to eat, to maximize nutrition while providing the proper caloric intake for dad, mom and kids.

I’ve long said that I want to be around to see my kids grow up and have children of their own (if for no other reason, than so I can have the satisfaction of seeing them go through what their mom and I go through every day; and I hope Michael has twins). But I very likely would not have made it that far if we’d kept up our standard dietary habits. Every day I’d wake up tired, run down, sore and wishing I could just take a break for a while.

Since we’ve started eating right, I feel ten years younger and a whole lot more alive. I feel like there’s hope for my wife and me to reach our golden wedding anniversary, which is still 45 years in the future.

So watch this space. Every Monday I shall present facts and recipes for a healthier lifestyle. In between time, of course, you’ll be subjected to the usual rambling palaver.

Michael’s mommy and daddy received a very loud wake-up call last Monday evening.

My wife had a heart attack.

It came out of the blue. She has no family history of heart disease, she doesn’t smoke, and we had what we believe to be fairly healthy eating habits.

But the Emergency Room physician made it crystal clear to me: she was in the middle of a true myocardial infarction.

This isn’t something we’d ever had to deal with before, nor anything we could have expected. We did have signs, but we didn’t know how to interpret them.

In the weeks that followed Thanksgiving, my wife had complained repeatedly of recurring and increasing pain in her back and her right arm. The pain seemed to center in her chest, but included her right arm, her neck, jaw and tongue. Right after Christmas she scheduled an appointment to see her doctor. I took her to the visit on Monday. One of the tests he ran was an EKG, and he was concerned about one of the readings. He arranged an appointment with a cardiologist for Wednesday. He didn’t say he thought there was immediate danger or that he knew for certain what might be the problem, except that he was disturbed by her “depressed ST wave”.

We went home with a couple of new prescriptions for her: Metoprolol and nitro glycerin. My worry immediately shot through the roof when I overheard her asking the doctor about them on the phone, saying “So if I’m having chest pain, I should take the nitro glycerin?”

That evening, after putting Michael to bed, her pain was beyond anything she’d ever known. She’d taken Advil and Tylenol, but they did no good. We weren’t sure what to do, because despite the pain, it wasn’t clear what was going on. There was no tingling in her left arm, no radiating, stabbing pain. The medicine stated what symptoms to look for in order to justify taking it, and she wasn’t having those symptoms.

Finally, the pain was more than she could bear.

So I called my eldest daughter and asked if she could stay with Michael while we were away. When she arrived, I drove my wife to the emergency room at the local hospital.

That’s when we got our confirmation. The attending physician pulled me aside and gave me the news, and showed me the EKG they ran clearly indicating what was going on.

“We gave her the meds to slow down her heart rate, so that the area of the heart starved by oxygen won’t need it as badly. But we need to get her into the cath lab immediately. I already have the cardiologists on the way.”

He spoke as clearly and as sympathetically as he could, and though I was comforted by his words, I felt a fog of disbelief and shock descend over me.

My wife cannot be having a heart attack. She just can’t. If anyone should, it should be me. I’ve got the family history of heart disease. I have the arrhythmia problems and high blood pressure. It should be me lying there.

I held her hand and walked along side the bed as she was whisked upstairs to the lab for an angiogram.

“This is where we part ways,” the nurse said. I didn’t want to part ways. I wanted to stay with her. But I knew she was in good hands.

They told me to wait in the lobby of the cardiac care unit. Probably wouldn’t take more than 45 minutes. They were going to run a catheter up through her femoral artery, snake it along into her heart, inject a dye and use their scanners to determine where the blood was flowing, and more importantly where it wasn’t.

As I stood in the waiting room, I prayed to God. I knew it was His decision, and that His will was best, no matter whether I liked the outcome or not.

In what was simultaneously no time at all and also the longest 45 minutes of my life, the cardiologist came out the doors, locked eyes with me, and gave me two thumbs up. I exhaled a vast sigh of relief as my legs turned to jelly.

“She did really well, and she’s going to the recovery room right now,” he said. He explained that she’d had a 99 percent blockage in the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, one of the arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle, and this was causing the pain. They inserted a stent, which opens and holds open the artery, effectively removing the blockage.

After a few more minutes I was allowed to go back to her room for a visit. She was awake, but very groggy. She showed me the picture they took during the angiogram, of the before and after. The difference was crystal clear: blockage in one, free flow in the other.

Of course, they wanted to keep her there at the hospital for observation. The theory being, if she’s going to show signs of a complication, it would be better for her to do it where they can act immediately.

So for the next four days, I spent my time shuttling back and forth between home and the hospital.

I have my daughters to thank for taking care of Michael while I visited my wife alone. I dragged them along with me so we could have dinner with her there in the hospital in the evenings. I brought her a tall “decaf” (wink wink) latte every morning. We shared the most memorable New Year’s Eve ever, toasting the arrival of 2009 there in her hospital room with sparkling pear juice and plastic champagne flutes.

I brought Michael a few times, and of course he wanted to make the bed go up and down, and turn on and off every light he could find. And he wanted to call the nurse over and over again. He didn’t grasp the fact that it might make her cranky. I offered to give him a good reason to have to stay in his own hospital bed.

My wife is home now, and she and I are completely in agreement that our lifestyle needs to change. We need to eat better, and we need to get exercise.

So now we’re on a different diet. We’re going to be bumping up the fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains and lean meats. Back off on the dairy, limit the sugar, caffeine and fat intake. We’ve picked up a couple of books on nutrition, and will be sculpting a new menu for our family for this year.

And we will be taking walks every night, starting slowly and working our way up to vigorous 30 minute walks. We have plans to go on weekend hikes when weather permits, play tennis or swimming.

Our life, as we knew it, is over. Thank God, we have been given a second chance to do right. We now know that heart attack signs aren’t always easily recognized. We now know that it can happen to us, and that how we treat our bodies has a very real effect on our health and long-term prospects.

One day, everything changed. And it’s for good.