Kristen Ann McLaughlin - A secluded life...

As my Gen Z grandchildren head to the polls for the first time…

Two of our grandchildren will be voting for the first time in the upcoming midterm elections, but I doubt they’ll be asking for their grandparents’ advice. Politics isn’t what we discuss during family get-togethers–there’s a divergence of views, which always holds the possibility of an argument erupting, so this potentially inflammatory topic is carefully avoided.

But I do wonder what’s in the minds of these two Gen Z-ers as they prepare for heading to the polls. Do they understand the difference between the two parties–or doesn’t that matter to them? What are they looking for in a candidate? Do they realize how much propaganda is being thrown their way via social media?

It all seemed so much easier in our generation. Way back then the delineations between the two parties were fairly clear: Republicans were for small government, with an emphasis on states’ rights and individual responsibility; Democrats were for large, centralized government and policies to benefit society at large.

Now that’s still the general idea, but the emergence of computers, cell phones, AI, and the resulting growth of mass media has led to a proliferation of confusing and misleading information, not to mention downright lies. So with all that’s plunging down the feed of their cell phones, how are these young people able to make informed decisions about the candidates they’re pulling the lever for?

If they’d ask us, this is what we’d say: to vote responsibly is going to mean a lot of homework. Research and more research. Looking at the issues from both sides. Trying to find the right sources of information. Thinking about what you believe and what you want out of life, not simply trusting what someone else says about candidate X and candidate Y. Ponder all this. Ask questions. Don’t fall for political propaganda, but search for the truth.

And try to find out more about both the Republican and Democrat parties. (P.S. Don’t ask Wikipedia. Don’t ask the Republican National Committee or the Democrat National Committee, because biases exist everywhere. You’ll have to work hard at this in order to be truly informed.)

First, we’d suggest, find out the facts on these two parties.

According to The History Channel, the Republican party was historically known as the “Grand Old Party” (GOP). “Founded in 1854 as a coalition opposing the extension of slavery into Western territories, the Republican Party fought to protect the rights of African Americans after the Civil War. Today’s GOP is generally socially conservative, and favors smaller government, less regulation, lower taxes and less federal intervention in the economy.”

The fact that the Republican party was founded as an anti-slavery party might come as a surprise to many if not most of today’s Gen Z-ers (not to mention the Gen X-ers and Millenials). But it’s historically true, and the party’s first president, elected in 1860, was Abraham Lincoln. It was his election that led to the Civil War and ultimately the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Other Republican presidents include Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

Let’s turn to the Democrat party.

According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, “The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the United States and among the oldest political parties in the world,” tracing its roots to 1792, when the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, favored a strong central government. Later the Federalist party would become known as the Democrat party, with its first president, Andrew Jackson, elected in 1829.

Other presidents over the years include Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack O’Bama, and Joe Biden.

Wait a minute, our Gen Z-ers might say–these historical facts are fine, but how do they relate to today? Both the Republican and Democrat parties have changed over the years.

Well of course they have. But this is how they were founded and we’re just trying to look at the facts, trying to set the groundwork. We can see from history that the two parties were strongly opposed to each other from the very beginning. In fact, Alexander Hamilton, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington, was actually killed by his political opponent, Aaron Burr. The two argued about politics, which led to a duel, during which Hamilton’s bullet missed Burr, while Burr’s bullet struck Hamilton, leading to his death the following day.

But why, the Gen Z-ers may continue to insist, is this important?

It’s important because along the way of our unfortunately inadequate grade school, high school, and college education, the truth of history and the history of this country has been lost. It’s important to know how and why our country’s political parties were founded and then try and find out–if we’re to make informed decisions before voting–where they are today.

To get to that part, I’ll skip over the next hundred years or so–not even recommending reading some good books on political history, because that’s highly unlikely to occur today, for most people–and try to take a look at where the parties are now.

Our Gen Z-ers might object here, too, saying they don’t vote party, they vote for the person, man or woman, regardless of party affiliation.

And I’d counter with the fact that, unless a candidate is running as an independent, party affiliation makes a big difference, because he or she needs the funding and support of their party in order to get elected.

A little aside here on independent candidates: it’s fine that others are allowed to run in our elections and express their disapproval or differences with the party candidates, but they realize, as do, hopefully, most of the people who vote for them, that, except in the rarest of situations, they’re not going to win. (A list of third party and independent candidate performances in U.S. presidential elections can be found here.)

I can hear the potential of a long sigh here. “It’s all too complicated,” one of my grandchildren or their friends might say. “And all politics is corrupt anyway. I don’t think it matters who’s elected. I’m just going to stay home.”

Stay home and not vote? Not use the privilege you’ve been given to participate in a democratic republic? There’s only two words to describe that position: ignorance and laziness. Please don’t take that path. Yes, it’s work to figure out how to vote. But do the work!

Getting back to those two parties–what exactly do we know about them today? What do they stand for?

Let’s use two hot button issues today as an example: pro-life and open borders. If you’re somebody who thinks abortion is wrong, you might want to lean toward a Republican candidate, since a pro-life stance is in their platform, not in the Democrat’s. If you’re a believer in open borders, you might lean toward a Democrat candidate, as this is part of their platform, whereas the Republicans take a stricter stance on immigration.

But what exactly are the platforms of each party? You can check out the Republican platform here and the Democrat platform here.

Just take a close look at all the issues. we’d say to our Gen Z grandchildren. Think about and ponder them carefully, because those people chosen on November 3 to lead our government, both on state and national levels, will be hugely important in determining the direction of our country and your own future. Maybe like never before.

My challenge and question to them is this: will you take the privilege of voting seriously? Will you take the time to do the research?

The time to become a truly informed voter?

Sarcopenia, aging, and shoes

Sarcopenia: “a reduction in skeletal muscle mass due to aging… It can begin as early as age 30, when the body starts a slow, gradual reduction in muscle mass and strength.”

Well, that’s depressing. Our muscles begin to deteriorate as early as age 30? So what can we do to slow this deterioration?

Exercise. Watch our diet. Take supplements.

Regardless of these efforts, however, the years take their toll. We slow down, energy decreases, we have to remember we can’t do everything we used to.

And above all, as we move into our 60s and 70s and beyond, the biggest risk becomes avoiding a fall. Walking is more difficult. We don’t go down stairs without using a guardrail. Uneven ground can prove to be a challenge.

Good shoes becomes a priority. What to wear? For years we’ve been told we need good arch support and lots of cushy padding. Orthopedic shoes might not be attractive, but–so the experts say–they’ll help us walk more safely and comfottably.

Okay. We buy some. But we’re still feeling unsteady.

Then along comes the latest fad: barefoot shoes. Now, I love going barefoot at home, especially because we have radiant heated floors, and during the summer I love the feel of soft grass underneath my feet. But barefoot shoes? What good could they be? Aren’t they just a flashy, fashion kind of thing?

Enter our builder, Gavin, doing some house repairs. “Look,” he says, “I got a pair of barefoot shoes.”

“Wow,” I say. “They certainly are colorful!”

“They’re more than colorful,” he says. “They’re comfortable. I wear them everywhere now–on the job, into town. Everywhere. Best shoes I’ve ever had.”

Really?

“You should try some,” he continues.

My husband shakes his head. “Not my style.”

“They have them in all kinds of colors,” he assures us. “They’re really comfortable.”

When he leaves I do some research, check out the brand he bought online. They’re not expensive. Maybe I’ll give them a try, just for fun.

A day later, thanks to Amazon, they arrive. I put them on and begin walking around. He’s right–they are comfortable!

My husband eyes them curiously. “They look a little weird. I can see the outlines of your toes.”

“They’re BAREFOOT shoes,” I say. “They have a wide toe box.”

“Do you think they have them in gray?”

I buy him a pair.

When they arrive, he puts them on and walks around, amazed. “They do feel good.”

We start taking our morning walks in our new barefoot shoes. And before too long we notice an interesting thing: not only do we feel steadier on our feet, but we can tell they’re increasing the strength of our leg muscles.

After a week of walking in them at home, we start wearing them everywhere–into town shopping. Even to church.

“Maybe I should get some black shoes for church,” he says. “These gray ones look a little too casual.”

I find him some black barefoot shoes with less toe pronouncement.

He likes them. He wears them to church.

“You know,” he says, as we get into the car. “When I go down the aisle for Communion, I feel steadier.”

“So do I!” I say.

We tell this to fellow octogenarian friend, Pat. She looks at our shoes dubiously. “I need a good arch support,” she says, looking down at her padded sandals. But then, pausing, she looks back up at me. “What kind did you get?”

A few days later she emails me: “My shoes arrived. But I can’t get them on. I need help.”

We meet at church and then follow her home. She shows me the shoes.

“Your toe goes right up to the top,” I say. “They’re too small.”

But she puts them on anyway, tries walking around. “They ARE comfortable. I’m going to return them and get a larger size.”

The next day there’s an email from her sister, Jane. “Tonight, I started wearing barefoot shoes. Pat’s, which were too small for her, fit me well and I’m amazed at how comfortable they are. I can already feel changes in my posture, etc. but am not quite sure what or why they work so well for me.”

Why indeed? Who knew the best possible shoes for helping with sarcopenia might not be highly-touted, padded and expensive orthopedic ones with great arch support, but simply shoes that keep you closer to the ground–walking around the way we were originally created.

An Old Time Doctor: His Story

My Dad, born in 1922, was the first in his Norwegian immigrant family to attend college. After four years in medical school and three in residency, he set up his own practice as the local doctor in a small Wisconsin town.

I remember going on house calls with him and waiting in the car while he grabbed his black leather bag and headed for the house and his patients.

Those were the days when doctors truly followed the Hippocratic oath they took when receiving their degree:

Hippocrates had another famous dictum:

And another:

A physician is a noble calling. At least it used to be before, early in the 20th century, oil magnate John D. Rockefeller – with the help of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and his foundation – hired Abraham Flexner (not a physician) to visit and assess all the hospitals and medical schools in the United States. The result was an infamous turning point in “modern medicine”: the 1910 Flexner Report, which eventually made these Hippocratic ideals virtually impossible.

My father had no way of knowing what had happened only a decade before he was born. Nor could he imagine, when he headed off for medical school, the far-reaching results of this report. Based solely on standards compiled by Rockefeller and Flexner, which promoted science-based, pharmaceutical-centric medicine, the report led to the closure of many medical schools – especially those teaching homeopathy, naturopathy, and other alternative methods – and drastically reduced the number of hospitals in the U.S.

A fascinating documentary on how this happened can be found here. There are many other such documentaries – here’s another.

My father didn’t know anything about what Rockefeller had done, but over the course of practicing medicine in the U.S. during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, first as an M.D. and then as a psychiatrist, he would come to realize what had happened and how anything threatening pharmaceutical companies would be suppressed.

One startling revelation came in the 1960s during the evolution of birth control drugs such as Enovid-E. Suddenly his office visits were swelled by women suffering depression and anxiety. What could be causing this? He asked each of the women if they’d recently begun taking a new pharmaceutical drug, and overwhelmingly they pointed to Enovid-E, the current “gold standard” for birth control. After asking them to stop taking the drug, he found that, within a week or two, the majority of women reported no longer feeling depressed or anxious.

Fascinated by what he had discovered, he naively supposed that not only the medical establishment but the general public would want to know about these findings. Since he’d recently published an article in Ladies Home Journal about the early signs of suicidal depression, he contacted his editor there – let’s say his name is Bill – and received an enthusiastic go-ahead to write another article. Once he’d finished, he mailed it to Bill but didn’t hear back. After weeks had passed, he called Ladies Home Journal. “I’m sorry,” an operator said. “Bill no longer works here.” Where was he? “I’m afraid we’re not at liberty to say.”

At first Dad thought it was just his bad luck. Later he wondered: was Bill fired, or did he leave, because they wouldn’t allow him to do a piece that would lose money for the makers of Enovid-E?

I once had a similar situation as a reporter for The Daily Record in New Jersey. I’d recently been cured of recurring headaches after seeing a homeopathic doctor in New York, and my editor encouraged me to write a piece about this. It was published, because my editor had senior status and was well respected, but afterwards he received a stern warning from the higher-ups not to have any of his writers do pieces again on “quack” science.

There was one evening toward the end of my father’s long medical career that remains in my mind. After having dinner with my parents, my father pushed back his chair, sighed, and said, sadly, “I wanted to help people, but I’ve just become a drug pusher.”

Some years later, when pharmaceutical medicine could do nothing to ameliorate my mother’s painful arthritis, he agreed that she should see my homeopath in New York who, thankfully, was able to help her.

Both of my parents, however, were still mainly listening to the advice of their doctors, and at the end of their lives each were taking numerous drugs for various conditions – some, I think, to offset the side effects of the others.

Finally, when my father was dying of a botched operation (I didn’t sue – he always felt that insurance companies and lawsuits had contributed to ruining the practice of medicine), his doctors said there was nothing more they could do and that it would be best to take him off all medications and the feeding tube that had been keeping him alive.

This was one of the saddest and most difficult moments of my life. Not only was my father dying, but after taking him off all medications, the dementia he’d been suffering from disappeared: he came back to himself. He remembered. He was Dad again – even for a few lingering days.

There are so many stories like this, from so many people. And yet, through Rockefeller’s successful efforts to increase his own wealth and those of his friends, the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry have not only locked arms over these last many decades but tightened them in a strangle hold that still binds our nation’s healthcare system.

The lectin-free diet: far from deprivation

Recently I received an email from a friend who had read my blog posts about lectins: The Lectin-free experiment, the Lectin-free experiment 2, and Lectin-free cooking and commented “I was marveling at the discipline of switching to a lectin-free diet. We like all kinds of food too much to give up favorite elements of it. I guess we strive for “healthy food in moderation,” which probably sounds better in theory than its real-life application turns out. If we thought about it, we’d probably also subscribe to the popular rationalization that so much of health is dictated by DNA rather than diet. In any case, we can only admire folks like yourselves who can live without things that just plain taste good.”

Wait a minute – we’re not living without things that “just plain taste good”! In fact, I think we’re having better-tasting foods than ever before, now that I’m trying new recipes and new combinations of foods. Here, for example, is what we ate yesterday:

Breakfast: hard boiled eggs* and homemade blueberry muffins*.

Lunch: Coconut wraps filled with tuna*, avocado, red onion, shredded carrots, sprouts, and Ranch dressing. Plus pickles* and our favorite drink – Pellegrino with a splash of balsamic vinegar (so good!)

Dinner: Butter-garlic broiled cod* with roasted broccoli and sweet potato fries served with a sour cream-mustard/honey/lemon sauce. Vanilla coconut yogurt and fresh raspberries for dessert.

lt all tasted good to us. Today we had hard boiled eggs again for breakfast (our favorite) with yogurt strawberry/banana shakes. For lunch we’ll have cheese* quesadillas* with radishes and green onions and probably more Pellegrino/balsamic drinks as well as a dessert of apples and almond butter. For dinner it’s chicken* and mushrooms with millet and a salad of mixed greens, red onions, and shredded carrots and then chocolate coconut ice cream (below is our favorite) for dessert.

Looking forward to it all. Deprived? Hardly. And the bottom line: I no longer have the health issues that plagued me for so long, even though I thought I was eating a healthy diet. I did some research and decided to experiment. By avoiding certain foods and substituting others that were non-inflammatory, I feel healthier now – despite my increasing years – than when I was younger.

*okay, there are substitutions here: all fruits and vegetables are organic, but I’ve been using those for years; the eggs are pasture-raised, as is the chicken; the cheese is goat cheese; the pickles are fermented: the quesadillas are made of gluten-free almond; and the fish is wild caught. Why? You’ll have to read my other posts on lectins 🙂

Meanwhile, coming up tomorrow for dinner is spaghetti and meatballs with salad and garlic bread. (Gluten-free pasta, gluten-free baguettes, and grass-fed beef – and yes, there now are delicious gluten-free pastas and breads. Maybe I’ll give a list of my favorite brands in another post.)

Here’s to your health – bon appetit!

“Christmas at the farm…”

Nearly fifty years ago I wrote a Christmas story for my column Antiquer’s Notebook, which appeared every Friday in the Morristown, New Jersey newspaper The Daily Record. Last night I started thinking about where that column was. I’d kept copies of all my old columns, but for some reason this one had disappeared. If only I could find it again….

Building the ADU: A Year Later…

Nearly a year ago I ended my last post on the topic of Building the ADU with “The next step: pouring the foundation.” And then, throughout the rest of 2024 and into 2025 – silence here, although I did keep a daily stream of building updates with photos on Facebook . The problem there, now, is that to find the beginning or follow the sequence of what happened requires scrolling down through dozens of posts. I want to have some kind of easily obtainable record for our family to look at – or that others who are interested in the building process can check out. So: back to this blog.

Building the ADU: preparing the site

It began at the end of June with the arrival of heavy machinery needed for digging the foundation. But first, a number of trees had to be taken down that were too close to the proposed “new wing,” otherwise known as an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU). You can find out why we needed to add onto our house here. A daily blow by blow with videos can be found on my Facebook page here.

Finding Cathrineholm

One person’s giveaway is another person’s treasure.

Recently friends of mine were cleaning out their closets and garage and getting rid of items they no longer needed or wanted. Knowing I had an Etsy shop, they asked if I’d like an enamelware bowl to sell. As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was: a Cathrineholm lotus bowl in avocado and white.

The HELOC miracle

It took three months to get our HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit) for building the addition to our house, otherwise known as an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU – see my last post). The whole process was a roller coaster. Without the thrills – that is, until the last day when the miracle happened.

Another building project: The ADU

We thought we were done building, that this would be our “forever house.” Never say never. Or plan too far into the future. Life has a way of taking curious and unexpected courses.

Last year our daughter, son-in-law, and two youngest grandchildren decided to return to New Hampshire after several years of living in Vermont. They moved in with us “temporarily” while looking for a house to rent. After months of searching, however, they couldn’t find anything suitable. There’s a severe shortage of houses for rent right now, a situation that appears to be occurring throughout the country.