Deadline is over and so is my periodic colonoscopy. Thank goodness on both counts!

No sooner did we got off deadline for the upcoming Jan/Feb 2008 issue than I had to go in and get this necessary test. My father died of colon cancer at age 57, and ever since my brothers and I have had this colon checkup on a periodic basis.

So what is a colonoscopy?They put you to sleep and the doctor shoves a thin flexible tube up your butt so he can examine the colon for any potentially precancerous polyps. He even takes photos on the inside of the colon. It takes about 20 minutes and is completely painless, even if he finds a polyp or two and has to snip them off for a lab exam, which he had to do with me.

The only problem with having a colonoscopy is you have to drink two bottles of this awful cleansing goop before the procedure so you are completely flushed out. Not only does the goop taste terrible, but you’ll be sitting on the pot half the day until you are cleansed. For more details, click here.

But despite the taste of the goop, you still should get one, no matter if you are a man or a woman. Colon cancer is largely preventable if you eat a diet high in fiber, and it’s curable if it is caught early enough by one of these exams. Colon cancer used to kill a lot of people — my Dad for example — but it doesn’t kill so many now because many people have gotten wise to this easily accessible preventive measure. The procedure itself is simple and quick. They put you to sleep, so you feel nothing. It can be embarrassing to some folks, like me, but it’s over with so quick that it’s not that embarrassing. In another 10 years I’ll go in for my next one.

I’ve always strived to stay healthy by exercising and eating properly. Ever since my heart bypass surgery nearly two years ago, I’ve tried even harder and have armed myself with more knowledge by reading several good health-related books. The books all have three main messages: (1) Exercise (2) Avoid bad fats such as saturated fat and trans fat (3) Eat lots of fruits and vegetables a day. Exercise Anything will pass as exercise as long as it gets your heart rate up for a half hour or more. When I work around the house, I approach it as exercise, not as a chore. The other day I decided I wanted to increase my firewood supply from two years to three years, so I chose a storage spot on the side of my house that would be convenient to my primary wood storage area, a covered area off the kitchen that allows me to chop wood out of the rain. I’ve already worked several days on the spot, cutting out a big bush that still has massive roots in the ground that must come out. Then I drove in 12 metal posts with a post driver, over which I placed wooden pallets that will serve as a backstop for one side of the woodpile. I’ve got another couple of days of good exercise waiting for me. It’s better than going to a gym, at least for me. I get bored at the gym, or riding a stationery bike, but I feel as though I’m accomplishing something while getting my heart rate up when I do chores. Avoid bad fats Avoiding bad fats is easy. Don’t eat a lot of meat, except for chicken, and then don’t eat the skin. What could be simpler. Of course, you have to become a label reader when you shop at the grocery store to make sure you don’t buy packaged and canned stuff that is loaded with saturated fat or trans fat. Other fats–the polys and monos–are not so bad. The omega 3s you get from fish are the best. They are fatty acids. Eat fish three times a week and you‘ll live long, unless you get unlucky. Japanese eat lots of fish and have very low rates of heart problems; Americans eat lots of meat and have very high rates of heart problems. With these facts I convinced my wife that I needed to buy a fishing boat so I could live longer. Which goes to show that healthy living is good on many levels. How many guys can convince their wives that blowing $50K on a boat is a good idea? Eat fruits and veggies Eating fruits and vegetables is on a par with the first two. The research varies only in the amount you should eat. At least five servings a day, but more likely about nine. No one really knows. Eating healthy has to involve a lifestyle commitment to fresh vegetables and fruits. We have a big garden and a number of fruit trees so we’re positioned well to eat healthy as a way of life. The other day we had a stir fry consisting of tomatoes, cukes, squash, and Swiss chard picked fresh from our garden. Some skinless chicken chunks made it a protein-rich meal. On the side we had corn on the cob, also picked from the garden. My boys and I make a big deal of our many stir frys, taking out our private sets of chop sticks to eat them. Lenie likes to put up some of our garden veggies, and she’s made it an enjoyable break from the usual routine of running the magazine. The other day she and her friends spent the day on our deck pealing and cutting up our apples after our sons had harvested them from our several trees. She also made a bunch of jars of sweet pickles, which is probably my favorite treat, out of our garden’s cucumbers. While John Silveira was visiting the other day, he, my sons, and I picked all of our kale and blanched and froze it for future batches of kale soup. Kale soup is probably the healthiest soup on the planet. You’ll have to do a search of the website if you want the recipe. I’m making some tomorrow. We’ve still got some ears of corn in the garden, which I eat without butter or salt. Plain corn on the cob is delicious. Most people have convinced themselves that they have to smear corn on the cob with butter and salt. Not so! You just have to let your taste buds adapt to the wonderful flavor of plain corn. We also have plenty of cherry tomatoes, Swiss chard, squash, and pumpkins left in the garden. But the growing and harvesting season is almost over. In a few weeks we’ll begin letting our chickens free-range in the garden and all over our property. That will enrich their eggs with the many phytochemicals pharmacy houses have yet to synthesize in pill form. More healthy food in the form of phytochemical-rich eggs! And remember that an egg a day does not cause a cholesterol problem; a number of studies have shown that. Well, it’s raining now in Oregon. That means winter and woodstove fires are soon to come, which I welcome as more opportunities for healthy exercise for me. I am the main wood cutter in the house, although my 16-year-old son, Jake, has lately taken to this delightful pastime. Chopping wood is a mix of aerobic exercise and transcendental meditation, which I’ll explain in a future blog.

I’ve been health conscious ever since I underwent triple bypass surgery nearly two years ago. Very often for breakfast I have a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and craisins (dried cranberries), plus whole wheat toast with a garlic and oil spread. The oatmeal keeps my cholesterol lower by as many as 15 points, the raisins and craisins supply me with two of the recommended nine servings a day of healthy fruit and/or vegetables, whole wheat at almost every meal is now recommended by the latest medical research, and garlic is the next best thing to a wonder drug. It is my garlic spread that I enjoy the most, however. I keep a little bowl on the counter that I fill with extra virgin olive oil, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and lots of chopped garlic. The raw bitterness of garlic mellows after a day immersed in the oil and it makes a delicious spread (applied with a small paint brush) on my toast. About three days a week I drop an egg fried in healthy canola oil onto the toast. The latest research shows that an egg a day does not raise your cholesterol. Our eggs are also home grown by our chickens who free-range so pick up a lot of phytochemicals in their eggs, and phytochemicals are very healthy for humans. Lenie and I try to pass on our healthy eating to our kids. They have come to like healthier olive oil, rather than butter, on their toast. They don’t like the straight garlic chunks or balsamic vinegar of my mixture, but those two things separate and drop to the bottom of the bowl, so I just paint their toast with the olive oil from the top. And they like their eggs cooked in healthy canola oil; if you stop cooking with butter or lard or other unhealthy oils, your taste buds will get used to the healthy oils. Our kids have also gotten used to turkey bacon, which is at least 65 percent less fat than pig bacon. And they prefer whole wheat bread over that worthless pasty white stuff. Now is the time to get the kids used to eating healthy foods. Autopsies done years ago on our young dead soldiers during the Vietnam Conflict revealed a surprising level of coronary artery blockage among these young men. It sent alarm bells through the medical community, as doctors began realizing that heart disease can start at a very young age. The best book I have read on eating healthy and putting all these things in perspective is Eat, Drink, & Be Healthy by Walter C. Willett. After I read it, I bought five copies and sent them to my brothers and close friends, then put it in the Books section of the General Store of the website. We live in an age where there is plenty of accurate life-extending information about disease prevention; my bypass surgery compelled me to go out and read it. A publishing tip — promotion in a changing world Publishing a magazine like BHM is a lot of fun. I go my own way when it comes to the editorial content, dismissing the “experts” who say I can’t write about this or that because it will hurt my sales. But I do keep in mind that to publish a magazine you must earn a certain minimum amount of money to stay in business. Since I’m not very good at keeping track of what that minimum amount is, I let my wife, Ilene, do it. She doesn’t mess with the editorial content of the magazine, but understands you must send out a lot of mail solicitations if the magazine expects to get a lot of subscribers’ checks in the mail, so she is always hunting down appropriate mail lists we can solicit. No mail out equals no mail in. My editorial approach sometimes makes certain subscribers cancel their subscriptions, but Lenie finds new subscribers. The subscribers who do stay with us tend to treat us like family, because I think they appreciate the magazine’s editorial candor and honesty in a publishing industry that is easily intimidated by special interest groups who want only politically correct topics discussed. So promotion of the magazine is a key to success. The internet, including this blog, is another arm of our attempts to promote BHM. But the internet, so far, earns BHM very little money; our income comes primarily from the sale of our print issue. But this blog and our internet website will hopefully alert potential subscribers to the value of our print issue. As publisher of BHM, I am betting that the amount of money and time put into our internet presence will eventually translate into print issue sales. But I’m not sure! The jury is still out on internet sites for all publishers. We are treading on new ground here, as no one really knows how to make money from the internet because readers’ have come to expect all information on the internet for free. But the internet has one attribute that plays into the hands of a good magazine like BHM: It allows readers to select what they want to read. Before the internet, readers had few choices, being forced to choose from among a few magazines covering their chosen topics, and those magazines were typically produced by large corporations who served up a sort of bland mush of politically correct topics. Readers have many choices on the internet, including the choice to stop reading the bland mush and search out quality in-depth articles about subjects in which they are interested. So I’m betting that if BHM offers its typical quality articles, as we have done for 18 years, readers will automatically migrate to the BHM website. Magazines who continue to offer the bland crap that they have offered for years will lose their readers. The internet, I believe, will force all publishers to either offer a lot of quality material free, or they will lose subscribers to those (like BHM) who do. I believe that the BHM website, and vehicles like this blog, will stimulate the conversation about BHM and what it has been offering readers for 18 years. The internet, by its nature, forces the cream to the top. It will eventually eliminate the need for the large sums of money to do the large snail mailings a publisher must now do to let people know you offer quality material. The internet is the greatest equalizer of the publishing playing field in history. If you do not already subscribe to the print issue of BHM, I invite you to do so. It is even better than our website and the four blogs we have recently launched from its Home Page. If you are contemplating ever becoming a publisher yourself, look to the internet as the key ally of the future. The world of publishing is changing rapidly, thanks to the internet, and it is those people with good ideas and products who will benefit most. — Dave