An overly preachy health book

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, health, wellness, advice, polemics

The Dewey Decimal code for The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life, by David B. Agus, MD, is 590. That number means "Zoological Sciences". It didn't take me long to realize that a more appropriate classification would be 613 (Promotion of Health) or 614 (Prevention of Disease), with a sub-classification meaning "polemic".

Ordinarily, if I decide not to read a book, I don't review it; I don't mention it. In this case, there may be some folks who can benefit from it, so I won't hide its existence. But it is not for me. There are a number of facts about different animals, although I don't think it is enough to get it a 590 classification.

The pattern is this: A story about what some animal experiences is presented, or a few facts about the lives of an animal, followed by a page or more of preaching. If the author could draw a simple conclusion without feeling the need to belabor the point to exhaustion, the book would be one-third the size…or less.

What would you pay for ten more years?

kw: analysis, longevity, health

By taking one simple step, making one change, one intervention, most sedentary folks can add ten healthy years to their lives. I have several friends who are physicians. One of them who speaks at church conferences recently made a statement to those who are 50 and over. I checked on it with others, and they all agree with him. He said,

"If you are not already exercising daily, adding exercise to what you are doing every day will add, on average, ten years to your life."

Upon further checking, I found that these are not ten years of poor quality; the final decline that we all must undergo if we are not taken suddenly by accident or illness will be delayed by ten years. Even more, it is likely that the early years of decline will be better also, effectively increasing our "health span" by more than ten years.

I once heard someone scoff, "Sure, I can exercise hours and hours for some added time. But will there be added non-exercising time?" That is, must you spend so much time in exercise that your time to enjoy other stuff is the same, just occurring later on? Let's investigate.

Consider the average fifty-year-old. If male, remaining life expectancy is 30 years, to age 80; if female, it is 33 years, to age 83. Adding exercise to gain ten years could yield either 90 or 93 total years. Ten years is 3,652.5 days, and with 16 waking hours per day, that comes to 58,440 waking hours. Let's use the figures for a male. Suppose that he must devote that whole 58,440 hours to exercise, spread over 40 years. How much is that? The simple calculation is this:

58,440 / (4×3,652.5) = 4 hr/d, or 1/4 of his waking hours.

This means that, if someone must add four daily hours of exercise, and must to keep it up for forty years to gain ten years of longevity, all the waking hours of the extra ten years will be spent exercising. He could take it easy instead, and it would be a wash. But how much is actually needed?

How much daily exercising time does my friend say is needed to get the ten-year bonus? Half an hour. That is, half an hour of doing something that increases heart rate, and leads to at least a "glow", if not becoming sweaty, by the end of the half hour. A half hour daily adds up to 7,305 hours spread over the forty years.

If it is legitimate to do so, we can put this figure into simple terms: Each year gained was "paid for" by 730.5 hours of exercise, or a half hour daily for four years. Four years of daily exercise gains an added year of healthy life.

Now, take care: This is not a linear relationship, so going for an hour instead of half an hour isn't going to give you twenty added years. It could add some, but I don't know how much. I remember Jack LaLanne, a fitness guru of the 1950's and '60's. His daily exercise routine was 4-5 hours of all kinds of exercise. He lived to age 96 years and 4 months. How long would he have lived without so much exercise? I don't know. But I do know that he enjoyed exercise, so it wasn't drudgery to him.

Exercise is drudgery to most of us who aren't already gym rats. But that half hour isn't too high a price to pay for the extra time it yields. This is the take-away message for someone fifty or so:

Break a sweat each day for four days, and gain a full day of life! Do so for the rest of your life, and you'll have lived an extra ten years.

Premature advice about gene tuning

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, health, diet, genetics, epigenetics, self help

The title concerns me a little: Dirty Genes: A Breakthrough Program to Treat the Root Cause of Illness and Optimize Your Health. The author is Dr. Ben Lynch, a naturopath who for about a decade has been studying the effects of genetics and epigenetics on chronic disease, and susceptibility to disease in general. He developed a "Clean Genes Protocol" people can use who want to improve their health.

So, what is a "dirty gene", and how can dirty genes be "cleaned"? The reason we are all different from one another is that there are very slight genetic variations in all genes. There are numerous variants of every gene. The variants for a particular gene are called alleles. The differences among alleles are mostly in the small numbers of SNPs that each gene contains. We'll look at SNPs later on.

We can use eye color as an example. When I was young I learned the Mendelian explanation of inheritance for brown eyes and blue eyes. Somewhere in the genome is a gene with a few common alleles (variants) that controls eye color; call it BrownEye. One allele makes eyes brown by coding for a protein that produces the brown pigment; call it BrownEye+. Another allele makes eyes blue because it codes for the same protein in a form that won't operate correctly, so the pigment is not made, and the natural blue iridescence of the iris is seen instead; call it BrownEye-. These two sentences explain why brown eyes are considered dominant: We all have two copies of each gene. If someone has two copies of the same allele, of course their eye color will be the expected color, brown if the two copies are BrownEye+ and blue if the two copies are BrownEye-. What happens when someone has one copy of each allele? The BrownEye- allele produces a "broken" protein that can't produce pigment, but the BrownEye+ allele produces a working protein, so the pigment is made anyway; thus, that person will have brown eyes. Caution: this is very simplified. More than one gene is involved, and there are several kinds of "brown", plus "green" and "hazel" eye colors.

I don't know what it is that is different between these two alleles of BrownEye. There are several kinds of mutations, changes in our DNA, and we each accumulate a few hundred new mutations in the DNA of every cell in our bodies in our lifetime. The average rate is about 65 "per generation", based on a statement in this Wikipedia article. I presume that a "generation" is the 20-40 (average 33) years between our birth and the age at which we typically reproduce. We continue to accumulate mutations after that, but none of those are going to be found in our descendants.

Remember, we have two copies of our entire genome in each cell. By far the most common mutation—which can be caused by cosmic rays, environmental toxins, and the "stumbling" that the DNA copying machinery does on occasion—is the SNP. This means that, at the age we usually reproduce, each egg or sperm cell in your gonads will differ in about 33 locations from the DNA you were born with, and 90% of those will be SNPs.

Dirty Genes is all about SNPs, considering those that cause our DNA to operate different from the "optimal genome" (my term) to be "dirty"; the author doesn't say what kind of SNP is "dirty", not in any useful way. I think he is really writing about alleles, but there can be many more than the two I posited above, even for something "simple" like eye color.

With this lead-up, we can get a bit more practical. Getting your whole genome sequenced now costs something over $1,000, compared to the few billion dollars spent to produce the first total sequence. If you were to get your whole genome sequenced, and that of one of your parents or siblings, you would find on average about 10 million SNP differences between the two of you, scattered somewhat clumpily throughout each genome.

A SNP is a "single nucleotide polymorphism". A nucleotide is a 3-codon (3-"letter") sequence such as AGC. If in a particular place you have AGC and your father has ACC, that "G" is the SNP. This may or may not cause trouble for one of you. The following diagram will help:

Each copy of your genome contains 3 billion codons. You have two copies, and each has its own SNPs. Divide 6 billion by 10 million to get 600: There is on average one SNP each 600 codons. However, they are a little more concentrated in the non-coding and non-regulatory regions of the DNA, but I have not been able to find out the quantitative difference. So we'll assume no concentration for the moment. (Illustration credit: MansiG123 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The coding DNA, the DNA that is used to make proteins, totals about 1.2% of the whole. So it contains at most 1.2% (probably somewhat less) of all the SNPs, or 120,000.

Regulatory DNA, that performs functions such as controlling the rate a particular gene produces protein, totals about 8% of the whole. So the number of SNPs found there adds up to another 800,000. The number of SNPs that can potentially "do something" is thus a little under one million. This squares with a statement by the author that we all have "a million" SNPs. But he doesn't explain it like I just did.

Now look at the diagram. We have to consider the section headed "coding region" to actually refer to coding DNA and regulatory DNA, or 9.2% of all our DNA. The "transfer table" used to convert DNA codons to amino acids in proteins has 64 codes. Three of these are used for start or stop (I think there are 2 "stop" codons). For the rest, 61/20 (there are 20 amino acids) is just over 3, and it means that the average amino acid has 3 codes that will request it in a pending protein synthesis.

A SNP that codes for the same amino acid as the DNA without that SNP is considered a "Synonymous" mutation. The protein isn't changed. So we can put 66% on the "Synonymous" box above, and 33% (or 34%) on the "Non-Synonymous" box. Below that, "Missense" means that the amino acid in the "different" protein will allow it to operate, but perhaps differently, while "Nonsense" means either that the "different" amino acid in that location will cause the protein to fold wrong and not work at all, or that the codon is a premature "stop" and the protein is cut short. "Nonsense" is more rare than "Missense", but I don't know by how much.

It comes down to this: About 300,000 of the SNPs in your DNA make it operate differently from whatever might be considered "optimal" or "standard". Since the actual distribution of SNPs is biased toward non-coding DNA, the number will be less. We have something over 20,000 coding "genes", maybe as many as 23,000. Each of them, then, contains a few SNPs; the average is about 14. So looking back at our BrownEye gene, the broken pigment that produces blue eyes is probably due to only one of the SNPs.

I infer that a "dirty gene" is one that has a Missense or Nonsense SNP, as compared to the "optimal" gene. Dr. Lynch is concerned with a combination of diet, exercise and other habits that support the proper operation of genes, as much as is possible based on the SNPs they contain.

The second genetic theme in the book is the methylation process that our cells use to actually accomplish gene regulation. Methylation is not yet well understood. It accounts for changes in gene expression; in particular, for example, the thousands of genes in a liver cell that are not needed for liver function are deactivated by being "coated" with methyl groups so they cannot be "reached" by the protein-producing machinery. Various levels of methyl "coating" are used for more fine regulation, such as the timing of certain proteins when they are needed or need to be temporarily slowed down or shut down. This is controlled by many of the "things" (we can't call them genes I suppose) that the regulatory 8% of your genome contains.

SIDEBAR: Hmm, I have seen the term "regulatory sequence" in a number of articles, and two abbreviations that may be synonyms: "regseq" and "refseq". These are both also used as software abbreviations, though, so I'll temporarily use "RS" for any of the "things" in the regulatory DNA.

The author's explanation of SNPs and "dirty genes" is directed quite differently from the above. I guess I expect more intelligence in those who read this, compared to his expectation for those who read his book.

Now I have to pan it. Ten years is a long time, and Dr. Lynch has given this a lot of effort, but he is up against a huge and hugely complex subject. What I think he has really done is to take the menu of recommendations that naturopaths have used for decades and give it a "new and improved" explanation with new buzz words. But certain fundamental knowledge is dramatically lacking. I'll pick one example that struck me early on.

No matter who you are, the Clean Genes Protocol begins with eliminating certain foods. Among them is gluten. This in spite that it is well known that only 1% of people suffer celiac disease, and thus cannot eat gluten. My former supervisor is one such, so I am familiar with it. Curiously, every time but one that gluten is mentioned in the book, it is a forbidden food. That one time, he throws a sop, telling us that one of his sons isn't bothered by gluten, but that he and the other son are very bothered by it. The term "celiac" is nowhere found in the book. That is shocking. Inexcusable.

A second example: The SNPs in a gene called the "methylation master gene", called MTHFR, are stated as a cause of Down Syndrome, along with a laundry list of lesser problems. Down Syndrome is caused by a very different kind of mutation, an extra Chromosome 21. I suppose you could call that 120 million SNPs. This is beyond belief!

I was only on page 24 when I saw that. I didn't read in detail much farther. I began to go through some of the recommendations—and found the gluten bungle—to see if it all might still make sense. It does not.

Compared to the recommendations of most naturopaths, the advice is actually a bit watered down. Though it is a fairly big book, he is trying to simplify the actual advice. But the reasons he gives for the recommendations do not make sense. "Dirty genes" is a catchy term. Maybe some day someone will define it more appropriately. But what is being "cleaned" from these "dirty genes"? Methyl groups. And you know, that is actually true, for the most part. The trouble is, this all has limited application. It is nowhere near as fine tuned as he claims.

The book is repackaged naturopathy with a shiny, new explanation for why things work or don't work, but the explanation doesn't explain enough. Our knowledge of the genome, the RS package (the "regulome"?), the proteome (all our proteins), and the saccharome (the different types of cellular sugars and simple carbohydrates, that outnumber proteins 20:1 or more), is very, very early and incomplete. Furthermore, instead of producing steps tuned to each individual's needs, the book's advice contains far too many broad brush recommendations will cause the majority of people to refrain from doing or eating things that don't matter, or that are perhaps better for them than not. In this case, a little knowledge can be quite a danger, indeed.

Need a daily dose of dirt?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, health, colon health, microbiome, therapies

RePOOPulation — What a lovely word! Coined by Dr. Emma Allen-Vercoe of the University of Guelph in Canada, it is one culmination of the research outlined in a new book by Drs. Brett Finlay and Marie-Claire Arrieta: Let Them Eat Dirt: How Microbes Can Make Your Child Healthier. For that matter, this implies that our inner bugs can help or harm us at any stage of life. Dr. Vercoe grows bacterial populations in "fermenters" (they make for a smelly building), for use in helping patients restore a healthy inner "farm" of bacteria and other microbes.

I grew up when a certain proverb was popular: "They can't grow up right without eating a peck of dirt." Considering how dirty and messy kids could get in the 1950's, '40's and earlier, a peck might just be the beginning (it's about 15 pounds, or a 2-gallon volume). Rightly understood, the parallel maxim "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" didn't refer to never getting dirty, but to washing well, particularly before meals.

Let Them Eat Dirt is a book of advice, but so well written that I didn't mind. And while it is about raising children, actually it is about raising a good (meaning virtuous!) crop of the hundreds or thousands of microbes that populate the gut of everyone. Even kids such as the "bubble boy" are not microbe-free, they are just being extremely well protected from pathogenic ones.

For all you germophobes out there: Experiments with germ-free mice (GF mice) show that animals with no internal nor external population of microbes are fatter, shorter-lived, and more prone to all the chronic diseases that seem to characterize our "clean" Western social system, such as asthma and diabetes.

Definition: microbiome. "a community of microorganisms (such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses) that inhabit a particular environment and especially the collection of microorganisms living in or on the human body. Your body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes, collectively known as your microbiome." [Merriam-Webster]

The book's chapters take us through all the stages of a child's life, beginning with the various ways a newborn's microbiome is formed, nurtured, and possibly damaged and restored. (Antibiotics effectively carpet-bomb our microbiome. Being nursed at the breast helps build a baby's microbiome, and at least partially restores the microbiome if the baby had to have antibiotics as an infant.) A baby born vaginally ingests its mother's vaginal and fecal microbes. All the cuddling, kissing, and even pre-chewing food a mother does for her baby continually adds to the microbes that colonize her baby's gut. Don't think that is icky! Unless the mother is desperately ill, that is very, very good. Later on, letting a kid play outside, including the inevitable dirty-hand-in-mouth. (The book's cover shows a grinning boy with really dirty hands, but a spotless face. Ironic!)

The book also outlines research that shows the relationship between many diseases that were formerly very rare or unknown but are now common, at least in the "advanced" societies of the industrialized countries. Not only allergies, asthma and type 2 diabetes, but many cases of autism produce a microbiome with a genetic signature that can be detected by analysis of the bugs found in the feces. With what is known now, many chronic diseases can be diagnosed by analyzing a stool sample. Although this presently costs more than more traditional diagnostic methods, that could change very soon. In fact, it may soon be possible to mail off a stool sample and get back a list of the diseases a person either has now or is prone to getting, plus suggestions how to change one's microbiome so as to forestall them. That's probiotics at a whole new level!

Whatever stage of life you may be, whether or not you'll be raising children soon…whatever. This book is well worth the read, and even taking notes for later reference. Enjoy!

A French Woman's advice for the rest of us

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, self help, beauty, health, women

Did you ever wonder who is behind the Louis Vuitton brand? The former CEO of the luxury goods corporation, originally with Clicquot, is Mireille Guiliano, who has now taken up writing in what she calls Act 3.5. Her genre is self-help health and beauty for woman, her first book was French Women Don't Get Fat, and now her fourth is French Women Don't Get Facelifts: The Secret of Aging With Style & Attitude.

I had no idea what to expect when I began to read, but I figured it would be worth a peek into the author's mind, on the principle of Know Thine Enemy. I am not sure how to characterize the result: if one could say that my wife and I represent different planets (not necessarily Venus and Mars), here we have a voice from another galaxy.

Ms Guiliano deplores the term Aging Gracefully as a cop-out. She prefers her title phrase, Aging With Style and Attitude. Sort of a "Don't back down" or "Don't rain on my parade" approach to the passage of time. After a chapter on gravity, she tackles dress, skin and face care, grooming (both hair and skin), cosmetic use, exercise (she prefers it "invisible", not to break a sweat), and rest and play. Then we find three chapters on food and nutrition; her attitude towards supplements is, if you've been paying attention to this point, your diet needs no supplementation. Three more chapters wrap up matters not otherwise dealt with.

The writing is peppered with examples among her friends and acquaintances, of women not just "of a certain age" (from forty onward), but into their 70's to 90's, who live their lives a mere 60-year-old might envy. I was reminded of my grandmother, the original "Little Old Lady From Pasadena", who might have inspired the song "Go Granny Go", still getting stopped for speeding in her last year on Earth, and usually talking her way out of a ticket. Ms Guiliano closes with an honor roll of remarkable women, from Catherine Deneuve and Sophia Loren to Michelle Obama and Queen Elizabeth II.

I was amazed (perhaps I should not have been) at the list of self-care tasks she brings to a "normal" day or month. A woman following her suggestions needs a remarkable memory. I'd suggest that the first order of business is, "Pick the right parents". As an oil prospector might put it, "It is better to be lucky than good." Thus, my lovely wife uses no cosmetics, and in the last couple of decades, has declined attending the salon at all; she preferred teaching me to cut her hair into the longish bob she likes, which I do about monthly. She does have a couple of creams and moisturizers from Sesha and Nivea on hand, uses sunscreen on bright days, and that is it. She believes the best skin is clean skin. When I compare that with the string of daily tasks in the "Skin and Face" chapter of the book, I wonder when a French woman has time for anything else!

Gentlemen, here is the best beauty tip for the woman in your life, unless she is a rampant feminist (in which case, she probably already divorced you anyway): tell her she is lovely. Do so early and do it often. Uplift her spirits and it will uplift all else. Happiness begets loveliness. Oh, and to make her even happier? Do your share of the housework.

Reading the book didn't unlock the feminine mystique, but left me more mystified. That is OK. God didn't put men and women together to understand one another, but to love one another. Leave the understanding business to Him…and I am not sure He is much into that anyway.

Some exceptionally good news

kw: health

A couple of weeks ago I went into central Philadelphia at my doctor's request to have the HeartCam™ perform a scan of my heart. This test uses ultra-fast, EKG-synchronized CT scanning to detect calcium deposits in the coronary arteries. Scores called "Positive" range from 1 to over 1,000. The great news is my score was zero.

These are a few of the images of my heart and lungs. The heart is the gray blob at the center. The upper two images are near the top of the heart, where trouble usually first appears, and the lower two are more in mid-heart. To see what calcium looks like, just look to the far right where a couple of my ribs are shown. The entire lack of bright white spots on the heart images indicates the happy (Negative) result.

The test took just a few minutes. I had to hold my breath, once for ten seconds and once for forty seconds. The scans are synchronized with the beat of the heart and are made when the heart is in a resting phase, where its position is most reliably the same from beat to beat. They call the technique EBCT because, rather than spin an x-ray tube around the patient, there is actually a huge tube with an x-ray producing electrode that wraps around below, and a fast electron beam (EB) makes a very fast swipe for each scan. The recording devices are stationary, and positioned above. Very clever engineering.

The zero score means I get a gold star (shown at the bottom of the chart). 75% of men my age have a calcium score of 12 or greater, and 10% have a score of 1,000 or greater. The percentiles they use are measures of "percent with a score less than X", so I converted them.

I feel very fortunate. I attribute it to good genes and God's care, and partly to a healthy lifestyle. This doesn't mean I can just go out and eat all the steak and potatoes I want. I could stand to exercise more, and while I lost some weight last year, I could really ought to lose some more. But I am not in any need of drugs to manage my cholesterol (it is very low already).

Of course, this mainly means I am quite unlikely to die of heart disease or stroke. One still has to die of something! With luck, I'll die of "old age", AKA general organ failure, rather than cancer. I've already had that, and I seem to have it beat. But this is one possible worry that has been taken right out of the running.

Ask any zookeeper

kw: musings, health, vitamins

I heard an infomercial Sunday in which were made the following points, all true:

• All mammals make their own Vitamin C except primates and guinea pigs.
• An enzyme needed for Vitamin C synthesis was deactivated in the ancestors of these animals.
• A medium-sized dog makes 4,000 mg of Vitamin C daily.
• Animals in the wild don't die of heart attacks or cancer.

The promoter/barker then drew the conclusion: Vitamin C prevents heart disease and cancer. At which point I turned off the radio. The program had an agenda, so the question was not asked, "What do wild animals die from?"

The short answer is, in the wild, they don't get old enough to die from the diseases of aging, heart disease and cancer in particular, but the actual mode of death differs: There are two classes of beasts, carnivores (including omnivores) and herbivores. One could also say, predators and prey. Taking them separately, prey first: They don't get very old, since once a prey animal begins to slow down, a predator kills it. For domestic herbivores, that predator is human, either a hunter or a worker in a slaughterhouse.

My first summer in South Dakota, I worked in a slaughterhouse. The first day I was given a tour. In the coolers where the carcasses hung before being cut up or sold, many had pieces gouged out and purple-ink stamps next to those places. I was told those were inspectors' marks, where they had found somatic cancer. These animals were not corn-fed monstrosities, but supposedly healthy, grass-fed cattle that had walked a few miles every day of their lives! A significant portion of them had cancer already, which would have killed them in a few more years. But beef cattle are killed prior to age two. If you leave any cancer alone, it usually takes more than two years to be the actual cause of death (I had cancer for close to five years before it was discovered and, thankfully, removed).

In the wild, big cats live no more than 10-12 years. Once they slow down, they have a harder and harder time catching prey until they simply starve. In zoos, lions and tigers can live 20-25 years. There, they are at no risk of starving. These cats can give birth shortly after age two, and most lionesses have given birth by age 4. They mature quickly. A twenty-year-old lioness is getting pretty decrepit, but a twelve-year-old? She's slowing down, about like a fifty-year-old person. Not many of those who run the mile in under six minutes as a teen, can run even a ten-minute mile at fifty. In a zoo, they don't have to. Pre-killed beef (or goat) is tossed to them on schedule. So how do zoo lions die? Ask any zookeeper: of heart disease or cancer! Even in those zoos with large, naturalistic enclosures where they have lots of roaming room.

And what about herbivores that are too big for lions: rhinos and elephants? I know elephants best. Even an old elephant, male or female, is too formidable for lions, which won't even try. But about age sixty, their teeth wear out and they starve. It would be an interesting exercise to put crowns (a couple inches thick) on the teeth of an aging elephant to see how long one would live if the teeth lasted longer! Upon autopsy, an elephant will often be found to have died with cancer and arterial plaque, both. But not of it; that isn't what killed them. Yet they make Vitamin C by the pound.

I make it a point to remember infomercial sponsors and avoid their products. If they are paying for 30-to-60-minute radio and TV shows, they are, perforce, charging more for their product to cover those expenses. I don't mind half-minute or one-minute ads. They are a reasonable expense.

How much Vitamin C do we need, then? 60 mg daily is enough for most of us to avoid scurvy. 500 mg or more is enough to cause mild diarrhea (or keep you loose if you're usually constipated). 250 mg seems to be a "sweet spot", an optimum dose, and the vitamin supplement I take contains 200 mg. I am sure I get at least 40 mg in my foods. That seems a sane course.

Dress Size Deflation

kw: opinion, beauty, health, fashion

I recently went clothes shopping with my wife. She's petite, a size 8...or that used to be petite. Now it is a "women's size." So is 7. Guess I haven't been to the women's department in a while (a few years? decades??). I sidled over to the other end of the rack. It topped out at 12, and there were few items larger than a size 10.

I remember that "women's" sizes were 12-16. I remember 5-7-9 shops, for the skinniest of girls. Now I've been told, by a high school girl we know, that many, many teenage girls (later teens: 15-19) are sizes 2, 1, and Zero! What's going on?

Two things are going on. One is, today's 8 is 1980's size 9 or 10 (or even 12, depending on manufacturer). That size Zero is really about a 3, in 1980 terms. A "real" Zero would have a 15-inch waist. Dressmakers label their stuff to sell, not to satisfy a mathematician. Little sizes sell.

But the other thing: Many, many young women really are starving themselves down to sticklike, scrawny caricatures. They all want to have a waist under 20 inches. Whatever happened to 36-24-36 as an ideal?

My size 8 wife is about the smallest woman of normal height (she's 5'-3") I can hold, and not feel I'm grasping a 4x4. I prefer seeing women who resemble the beauties in paintings by Rubens or Titian.

A bit of upholstery indicates good health and a good appetite. In 1865, Manet first showed Olympia. It was greeted with disdain. She was a real woman, not some idealized historical figure. And besides, she was too skinny. Folks today think she's a bit chubby, albeit a very pretty chubby.

Girls of all ages, I have a bit of advice. Do you know what's really attractive? Good health. A strong constitution. A cheerful, happy disposition. Cleanliness and neatness. Get out and walk more...and not just in the mall! Spend more time walking than you do watching TV. Wash off the cosmetics so your skin will be healthy. Eat healthy, enjoyable food, but stay away from fast foods. Don't get on a scale more than once a week—monthly or less is even better. Seek out friends who don't betray you, friends who are smart, curious, and upbeat. Drop anybody who gossips too much. Gossip reshapes your face, and not in a good way. Wear clothes that feel good, and you'll look good.