I recently saw an episode of NOVA called What Are Dreams?  Dreams are such a fascinating subject, and it was a great show.  It’s so interesting for example that scientists have identified 5 stages of sleep, can recognize them based on brain activity and physiological factors, know how long they tend to last and the order in which they occur -- yet the only way to determine whether a subject is dreaming is to wake them up and ask them.

And why do we dream in the first place?  One theory is that the brain is running simulations in order to test how our actions affect situations, in order to be better prepared to face potentially dangerous situations in real life.  Another says it’s the brain running through newly-acquired information in order to better learn/remember it, or to try and find connections between pieces of information that our waking mind might not realize should be connected.

For the past few years I’ve had variations of the same dream many dozens, if not hundreds, of times.  In the dream, I’m in school -- sometimes it’s high school and sometimes it’s college -- and it’s late in the semester.  I realize that for one of my classes, I haven’t attended it for most of the semester and haven’t done the assignments and can’t possibly pass it.  For the past year or so, however, that recurring dream has been largely replaced with another one: I’m in a situation involving a river or a lake (this is a good and fun dream for me) and I end up jumping or falling into it, then suddenly realizing that I’ve left my iPhone in my pocket.

After watching this NOVA episode, it occurred to me that although I spend the majority of my time alone (except for the cats), I can’t think of a single dream that doesn’t involve other people.  And it’s usually lots of other people.  It seems that my threat simulator needs to upgrade itself to prepare me for the kinds of threats that I might actually encounter: stubbing my toe on the way to the bathroom, being fangoriously devoured by a small housecat, etc.

Greg Gutfeld:

The Lancet retracted a horrible study attempting to link measle vaccines to autism.  Now this would really be great news, if the study had not come out, oh, 12 years ago.  It’s really scary that it took a medical journal over a decade to admit what nearly everyone else with a working brain knew: the study had more gaping holes in it than Tom Sizemore’s septum.

Just another case of doesn’t fit the narrative -- the narrative in this case being that the big pharmaceutical companies are evil.  The truth didn’t fit the narrative, whereas the study did, so the study won.  And so what if kids died as a result?

It’s much easier to blame a big faceless company than to consider the possibility that it’s your own fault, that by avoiding the sun yourself and keeping your kids out of it, you could be inviting all kinds of diseases and developmental issues including autism.

But Jenny McCarthy fighting big pharma makes headlines.  Saying "go outside and get some sun" doesn’t.

I got my Vitamin D3 test results last week: after taking 5000 IU of D3 daily for about 3 months, the level of "Vitamin D, 25-OH" in my blood is 75 ng/ml.  The results sheet says that the reference range is 32-100 and that "the range considered by most experts as optimal for health" is 50-70.  The Vitamin D Council says 50-80:

Quoting Vitamin D Council:

The body does not reliably begin storing cholecalciferol in fat and muscle tissue until 25(OH)D levels get above 50 ng/ml.  The average person starts to store cholecalciferol at 40 ng/ml, but at 50 ng/ml virtually everyone begins to store it for future use.  That is, at levels below 50 ng/ml, the body uses up vitamin D as fast as you can make it, or take it, indicating chronic substrate starvation—not a good thing.  25(OH)D levels should be between 50–80 ng/ml, year-round.

The test results sheet also has this to say about toxicity:

Be aware that Vitamin D levels greater than 150 ng/mL may lead to toxicity and high calcium levels.  This may be dangerous.  These levels are only achieved with supplementation, so if you are supplementing with high levels of Vitamin D (greater than 10,000 IU) then testing is strongly recommended.

Quoting JD Johannes:

How can something so logical as burning more calories through cardiovascular exercise not result in sustained fat loss?  The answer is in your body’s ability to adapt to exercise and the complex functions of the hormone cortisol.  The conventional wisdom of cardio is the energy in vs. energy out formula.  Burn more calories than you eat and you will lose weight. ... But the simple fact remains that even if you did create a 500 calorie deficit every day through exercise, you will not be able to exercise yourself out of existence.  Your body will adapt to the workload. [...]

According the University of New Mexico’s Len Kravitz, the critical level that results in excess cortisol secretion occurs after about 45 minutes of exercise -- some people hit the critical level earlier, others later depending on a variety of genetic and other variables. ... When cortisol puts the body in a catabolic mode while doing cardio vascular exercise the muscle is burned instead of fat.  For every pound of muscle that is burned, your resting metabolism slows down a little bit.  If your energy intake from food is not adjusted to the loss of muscle, you have a calorie surplus and will gain fat while doing lots of cardio.

He goes pretty deep into the science behind these ideas, and makes the case that High Intensity Interval Training is a good way to avoid the cortisol signaling that’s caused by sustained cardio and which results in muscle burn instead of fat burn.

The vitamin D issue just won’t go away.  Here’s a bit of a nice long article by Patrick Cox:

Quoting Patrick Cox:

The "scientific consensus" that has held sway for four decades regarding both exposure to the sun and vitamin D has collapsed.  What has emerged in place of the old "settled science" is the knowledge that most people in America are seriously vitamin D deficient or insufficient. [...]

Simply put, unless you are one of the few people with optimal serum D levels, such as lifeguards and roofers in South Florida, you can cut your risks from most major diseases by 50 to 80 percent.  All you have to do is get enough D.  It also means we can significantly reduce both health care costs and the staggering national deficit by taking a few simple steps. [...]

If you do take my advice and perform further research on this subject, you will still encounter holdouts who assert that unprotected exposure to sunshine is always dangerous and that a normal diet supplemented by a daily multiple vitamin provides sufficient vitamin D.  Behind the scenes, however, even the NIH is now looking for a face-saving way to change positions on vitamin D without taking too much blame for having resisted those who have urged reassessment for decades.

The stakes are huge, as are the benefits of attaining optimal vitamin D levels.  The embarrassment for those who must admit past error, however, may be even greater.  The reason is that untold millions have suffered and died prematurely because those who challenged the "settled science" regarding sunshine and vitamin D decades ago were treated like crackpots and demonized. [...]

[Dr. Michael Holick] questioned the conventional zero-tolerance approach to sun exposure that has held sway with dermatologists since the 1970s.  Holick, a professor of dermatology himself, lost his teaching position when he published his findings.  When he wrote a book on the subject, he was targeted by a well-funded PR campaign, aimed at debunking him, by the leading dermatological organization.  Supposedly objective journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, refused to publish his exhaustively documented research -- research now accepted as both accurate and pioneering. [...]

Optimal vitamin D serum blood levels, attained through sunlight or supplementation, dramatically reduce the risk of many diseases other than bone maladies.  Many of the most serious are ameliorated by an astonishing 50 to 85 percent.  These diseases include cancers, from breast and colon to deadly melanoma skin cancers. [...]

This is not the end of the list, though.  The big killers and most expensive diseases respond similarly to adequate D.  I’m talking about hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and stroke.  So do type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes (to a lesser extent), rheumatoid arthritis, peripheral vascular disease, multiple sclerosis, dementia, autoimmune diseases, and apparently even viral diseases such as H1N1 and AIDS. ... Even conditions such as autism and schizophrenia may be directly related to prenatal or infantile vitamin D deficiency.

Nevertheless, the NIH’s current recommended dosage for vitamin D supplementation remains basically unchanged since it was established to prevent rickets. ... This is extremely unfortunate because it takes about a hundred IU to raise serum blood levels by 1 ng/ml in a healthy adult.  To get into the optimal range, 40 to 60 ng/ml, one would therefore have to take 4000 IU daily. ... The evidence, incidentally, is that 10,000IU is entirely safe.

Also mentioned is that every single cell in our bodies has a vitamin D receptor, and around 10% of our genes are influenced by vitamin D.  Even psychological issues like depression and dementia are linked to it.

It looks like 2010 is shaping up to be the year of vitamin D.  It also looks like our generations may come to be known as the ones who hated the sun, and paid for it via all manner of diseases.

As I’ve mentioned before though, at this distance from the equator, you simply can’t get enough vitamin D from the sun except during the summer.  I’ve been taking 5000 IU of vitamin D3 daily for the past few months; for me it’s preventive since I’m pretty healthy to begin with.  I also received my vitamin D test kit last week and I just did the blood spot test today, so I’ll be sending that back to the lab and should get the results -- my vitamin D level -- soon after.

The bottom line here is pretty simple:
1) vitamin D deficiency causes lots of nasty diseases;
2) you’re probably vitamin D deficient;
3) you can fix it with extremely inexpensive supplements.

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly and explicitly promised that the health care reform process would be broadcast on C-SPAN.  He lied, and now the White House refuses to even acknowledge the issue.

Perhaps worse than the lie itself, though, is what it means: the Democrats pushing this absurd health care bill absolutely do not want the public to know what’s in it.

These people are supposed to represent us.  Instead, they’re creating laws in secret, forcing through the largest and most expensive government program in history -- one which the majority of Americans oppose.

This is the opposite of democracy.  The only thing these people represent is the complete corruption and perversion of our system of government.

On top of the fact that the people don’t actually want this bill, there’s the fact that we can’t afford it, and we’ll be lucky if it doesn’t destroy the country.

That’s why federal spending above its revenues should be illegal, punishable by crucifixion (or perhaps something even more painful).

Crucifixion would be too kind a fate for these people.

I just saw an ad for Hands-Only CPR.  I clicked on it (a web ad that I actually clicked -- that virtually never happens) and it turned out to be a broken link, but I then searched for it and found the site.

It says the following:

It’s not normal to see an adult suddenly collapse, but if you do, call 911 and push hard and fast in the center of the chest.  Don’t be afraid.  Your actions can only help.

But can that really be true?  Surely it’d be worth having some broken ribs if it saves your life, but... it seems unlikely that in 100% of these cases "your actions can only help."  Is it just me?

Today Kim came home with two big bags of Hall of Fame Kettle Corn popcorn from Dale and Thomas.  It’s really good: a little sweet and a little salty.  The sweetener they use in it is sugar -- crazy, right?

A few years ago I discovered this kind of sweet and salty "kettle corn" popcorn at the grocery store.  It was made by Pop Secret and I loved it.  But one day I happened to notice the ingredients and saw that it was sweetened not with sugar, but with sucralose (Splenda).  Of course I’m not going to intentionally eat that crap, so I had to give up the kettle corn, as every brand I found in the grocery store was sweetened with sucralose instead of sugar.

I can understand why some companies would choose an artificial sweetener over sugar: it’s likely cheaper than the real thing, and many consumers are obsessed with the idea of a magical substance that will allow them to lose weight while eating too much, which is how these substances are marketed.  But I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a single popcorn maker who used natural sweeteners in their popcorn.

Well, Dale and Thomas does, so kettle corn is back.

I ordered and received my 5000 IU Vitamin D3 the other day, and they included a free sample of fish oil pills with it.  The sample pack shows what must be the greatest product comparison of all time:

Great reporting by The New York Times on the appalling state of enforcement (i.e., virtually none) of water quality and safety regulations, at both the state and federal levels, throughout the US:

Quoting The New York Times:

In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times.  The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.

However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment.  State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene. [...]

Some violations are relatively minor.  But about 60 percent of the polluters were deemed in "significant noncompliance" -- meaning their violations were the most serious kind, like dumping cancer-causing chemicals or failing to measure or report when they pollute.

Finally, the Times’s research shows that fewer than 3 percent of Clean Water Act violations resulted in fines or other significant punishments...

"I met our inspector at the spill site, and we had this really awkward conversation," [DEP regulator] Crum recalled.  "I said we should shut down the mine until everything was cleaned up.  The inspector agreed, but he said if he issued that order, he was scared of getting demoted or transferred to the middle of nowhere.  Everyone was terrified of doing their job."

Mr. Crum temporarily shut the mine.

In the next two years, he shut many polluting mines until they changed their ways.  His tough approach raised his profile around the state [of West Virginia]. [...]

In 2003, a new director, Stephanie Timmermeyer, was nominated to run the Department of Environmental Protection.  One of West Virginia’s most powerful state lawmakers, Eustace Frederick, said she would be confirmed, but only if she agreed to fire Mr. Crum, according to several people who said they witnessed the conversation.

She was given the job and soon summoned Mr. Crum to her office.  He was dismissed...

The 7-page report focuses on some specific West Virginia problems but deals largely with nationwide issues.  They’ve also compiled a national database of pollution-discharge compliance and violations.

Over the past few months I’ve been hearing more and more about vitamin D deficiency.  Then a few weeks ago Steve Gibson, the guy who does the Security Now podcast, took a rare diversion from security to talk about vitamin D (podcast here).  He created a page about vitamin D explaining everything and citing all the research he’s read, and that page also links to some good videos on the topic: a 90-second video focused on cancer; another 90-second video on cancer and sun exposure; a 6-minute video on vitamin D’s effect on general health (money quote: people who take sufficient vitamin D supplements just don’t get sick anymore); and finally a 1-hour video full of tons of vitamin D science.

Certainly watch the 2-3 shorter videos, and watch the longer one if you have time.  But the bottom line is this: many and probably most people are vitamin D deficient, especially in the winter months; and vitamin D deficiency is linked to not only many forms of cancer but also autism, bone diseases, tuberculosis, psoriasis, and many other diseases.  And in particular, vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy and after birth can cause lots of problems for babies, most famously the disease rickets.

Crucially, vitamin D is not actually a vitamin at all; it’s a hormone.  So it’s impossible to get a sufficient amount of vitamin D from your diet, unlike most real vitamins.  The only way to get sufficient vitamin D is from the sun, or via supplement -- but a multivitamin will not give you nearly enough.  For example, in milk that’s fortified with vitamin D, and in most multivitamins, there’s only a few hundred IU of vitamin D, whereas 10-20 minutes of noontime sun exposure will cause your body to create around 10,000 IU of vitamin D.

The problem is that in recent decades, due to the problem of skin cancer caused by overexposure to the sun, we have massively overcorrected, with the scientific, medical, and governmental guidelines generally recommending that we avoid the sun entirely, never being exposed to it without sunblock.  But since sunblock blocks virtually all UVB, your body doesn’t make any vitamin D when you’re covered in sunblock.

The solution is to get a moderate amount of noontime sunlight on a daily basis.  As mentioned above, just 10-20 minutes will boost vitamin D levels into the healthy range, and will not give you a sunburn.  It must be within about 2 hours of solar noon though -- which is 1 PM in the northern hemisphere -- because outside that range, the sun’s angle in the sky forces it to travel through much more atmosphere, which totally blocks UVB outside of about 10AM-4PM.  That’s also the reason it’s much harder to get a sunburn except within a couple hours of solar noon.

But during the winter, unless you live very close to the equator, the sun’s angle again prevents it from delivering enough UVB to generate healthy amounts of vitamin D in your skin.  Because of this, and because you can’t get sufficient vitamin D via diet, I plan to start taking a vitamin D supplement soon; Steve Gibson’s vitamin D page has his recommendations about halfway down the page, and in terms of dosage it appears that 2000 IU/day is a good amount.  And that’s about an order of magnitude below the level at which toxicity begins to become an issue.

This topic fascinates me partly because of its obviousness: for all of human history we’ve been exposed to at least some sun nearly every day, so the idea that we should now suddenly start avoiding it altogether is just insane.  It appears that we’re now suffering many unintended consequences of that advice.  There are lots of interesting statistics in the videos above, but one that sticks out to me is that, for some forms of cancer, vitamin D deficiency causes a doubled risk of metastases and a 75% increased risk of mortality.

OK, so maybe that’s not exactly what this Time Magazine article says:

[T]he peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE ... published a remarkable study ... The findings were surprising.  On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised - sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months - did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. ... Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each. [...]

Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment.  Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home. [...]

"I see this anecdotally amongst, like, my wife’s friends," [Dr. Church] says.  "They’re like, ’Ah, I’m running an hour a day, and I’m not losing any weight.’"  He asks them, "What are you doing after you run?"  It turns out one group of friends was stopping at Starbucks for muffins afterward.  Says Church: "I don’t think most people would appreciate that, wow, you only burned 200 or 300 calories, which you’re going to neutralize with just half that muffin."

I recently discovered that my eating habits were affecting my weight far more than my level of exercise.

Sometime about 6-8 years ago, while I was in college, I noticed that I ate about every 4 hours.  At that point, I guess I subconsciously decided that that was when I was supposed to eat, because ever since then, that’s been the main determinant in deciding when I should eat.

A few months ago, I noticed that my stomach fat was getting a little out of hand, and for some reason it occurred to me that the whole every-4-hours thing was totally arbitrary.  I mean, sure I was hungry at ~4 hours, but what if I stretched it to 6 hours instead?  Over the course of a day that’d cut out an entire meal.

So I started doing that, and sure enough, in 2-3 months, I’ve lost 15 pounds.  I was previously right in the middle of the "overweight" range on the BMI scale -- and no the BMI theory is not perfect, but it’s a useful metric -- whereas now I’m just barely inside the "normal" range.

I’ve also started paying attention to the quantities of food that I eat.  For example, going out to a restaurant and eating the bread, the salad, the appetizer, and the whole entree -- which I used to do, even though I was stuffed afterwards -- is just ridiculous.  And for most of my life I’ve been able to eat huge amounts of everything and not gain weight; that of course changed in my mid-20s and it’s taken some conscious effort to stop eating that way.

But my point is that I achieved this not-insignificant change in my weight purely by adjusting my eating habits -- and only the timing and quantity, not what I eat.  I go for a 2-mile walk a couple times per week, and a ~10-mile bike ride maybe once or twice a week, which is the about same level of exercise I’ve done for the past few years.

Cringely has a medical malpractice post that I don’t find terribly compelling, but here’s one of the comments on it:

Government trying to do anything for us is always bloated and inefficient because there are no checks and balances to keep costs down.  None.  Private business (up until the bailouts) must keep costs in check.  Government doesn’t care about that.  Why should they?  So when costs go out of control they either tax us at higher rates and/or print more money.

It’s not the party that’s in power, it’s the system that it has evolved into.  Have we not figured that out by now?

You might say that’s overly cynical but it seems about right to me.  I’m certainly no fan of insurance companies; I think insurance in general is just about the biggest scam that there is.  But I don’t consider it an improvement to replace [insurance system] or [other broken part of health-care system] with [corrupt politicians] or [additional layers of bureaucracy].

In the real world, you need to clearly identify the problem before you implement the solution.  But not in government.  It drives me crazy that these politicians are insisting on speed at the expense of correctness.  When Obama insists we must pass health care reform ASAP, it makes lots of people suspicious.  When Arlen Specter says that we have to "make judgments very fast" on a 1000-page bill that hardly anybody has even read, the crowd reacts instantly and angrily -- and rightly so.  What sane person thinks that it’s a good idea to make quick judgments rather than careful decisions on such huge and important matters?  Only politicians think that.

I’m all for reforming things that are broken.  But we need to clearly identify those things before we can fix them.  Ramming through a 1000-page bill is not a solution, and a government that would do such a thing is in itself broken, in a far more serious way than the health-care system is.

There’s a stereotype that geeks eat a lot of junk food.  But other than Utz Party Mix and a particular kind of potato chip, I’d say what I tend to eat is more "snack food" than "junk food".  I eat a lot of mixed nuts, almonds, and sunflower seeds, as well as popcorn and granola bars.

I’ve come to realize that laziness is the primary factor in determining what I eat.  I will almost always choose, say, a can of mixed nuts that I can just crack open and eat over something that I need to prepare.

In light of this, I’m trying to come up with & keep on hand foods that are more healthy but still require little or no preparation.  Here are some of my staples:

bananas
orange juice with "lots of pulp"
pickles
salsa & tortilla chips (OK, and cheese)
apple sauce (in individual 4-oz containers)
berry apple sauce
granola bars and nuts, as mentioned

What else should be on my list?

Various tidbits seen over the past week or two:

...

From the Times Square Tea Party: "Do I look like a racist redneck teabagger to you?"

...

A hilarious Good Samaritan story by Scott Adams:

Luckily I did not have jumper cables, because if I did, I knew we would be late for the movie.  I did my best to make a face that said, "I sure wish I could help," while being secretly gleeful that this was officially not my problem.  I wondered if the young man thought I was lying about not having jumper cables.  My fake sincerity face looks like a mime with an intestinal infection.

...

Joe Biden on rural broadband funding:

The bottom line is, you can’t function -- a nation can’t compete in the 21st century -- without an immediate, high-quality access for everything from streaming video to information overline.

I don’t know what I’d do without a high-quality access to information overline.  In fact, I don’t even know what that means.

...

This article claims that wheat bread is no better than white bread.  But what’s interesting is some of the detailed information about metabolic functions that it contains.

...

From amazon: Classic Live Lobster Combo for Two People.  I don’t suppose it needs to be said that amazon rocks, this rocks, and "Lobsters-Online" rocks.

...

Ceiling cat.  The photo of the cat looking down is great.

Quoting The New York Times:

President Obama ... said the tobacco legislation was "a bill that truly defines changes in Washington" and one that "changes the way Washington works and who it works for."

These kinds of comments are often just political BS, but this statement is somewhat true since, as I’ve said before, the only reason tobacco is legal while heroin is not is the rich & powerful lobbying force behind tobacco.

Quoting The New York Times:

The legislation will enable the Food and Drug Administration to impose potentially strict new controls on the making and marketing of products that eventually kill half their regular users.

Obviously the fact that heretofore the FDA could not regulate tobacco -- a horribly addictive and deadly drug -- is just absurd.

Quoting The Wall Street Journal:

"Allowing the FDA to regulate tobacco in any capacity would inevitably lead to the FDA regulating the family farm," Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., said during the House debate.  "This could create uncertainty for family farmers as they are already struggling."

Talk about BS.  "Family farm" is not synonymous with "tobacco farm."  And guess what, when the product that you sell kills millions of people annually while serving virtually no valid purpose, then you deserve to go out of business.

Being rich and famous must not be all bad.  Scott Adams posted an entry called Tuesday, the entirety of which is:

No blog post today.  Sick cat.

...and he still gets 20+ comments on it.

Of course based on the kinds of things he posts, this could be one of his experiments on humanity and psychology which will be explained in a later post.

Quoting The New York Times:

That’s the term being used to describe the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers’ hair and clothing, not to mention cushions and carpeting, that lingers long after smoke has cleared from a room.  The residue includes heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials [...] Third-hand smoke is what one smells when a smoker gets in an elevator after going outside for a cigarette, [Dr. Winickoff] said, or in a hotel room where people were smoking.  "Your nose isn’t lying," he said.  "The stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ’Get away.’"

Over the weekend we were in Maryland for Travis and Megan’s wedding.  Before the wedding, I had to go to Best Buy, and this Best Buy was in a mall, which was so packed that I had to park about a quarter-mile away.  As I walked towards the store, I thought, "At least I’m getting some exercise."

What I needed at Best Buy was a battery for Kim’s camera, because hers was dying and the charger was back in PA.

It occurred to me that humans and batteries are constantly dealing with the inverse of the same problem.  For humans, the problem is that our bodies are so good at storing energy that we need to go out of our way to get rid of it on a regular basis.  For batteries, the problem is that they can’t really store very much energy, so they need to be recharged often.

The solution is obvious: we need a way to plug our phones and other gadgets directly into our stomachs and our butt cheeks.

I only get sick about a couple times each year, and even then it’s usually mild, so I may be one of these people.  I checked out this article to see if I match any of their "secrets."

Training for the Body - I’m not an exercise nut, and I could stand to do more of it.  But I do exercise at least a couple times per week, even if it’s just 30 minutes of drumming.

Pay Attention to Your Mouth - gargling with antiseptic mouthwash?  No.

An Apple a Day - No.  One per month, maybe, and then only in pies.

Don’t Worry, Conquer Stress - Yes.  I rarely get stressed over anything.

Up Your Vitamin Intake - Yes; I take a multivitamin daily, and I drink milk daily (mentioned in the article for vitamin D).

Mind Over Body - Uh, this one is talking about some loon who "doesn’t believe in sickness" so... no.

Just Say Om - Yoga/meditation?  No.

Increase Your Social Ties - No.  I’m a hermit.

Accentuate the Positive - "a positive emotional style -- described as happy, enthusiastic, and calm" - yeah pretty much.

Wash Your Hands - Over and Over - Yes.  Also note this video wherein they recommend (a) turning off the faucet using a paper towel so as not to re-contaminate your hands and (b) using your shoe to press the toilet flusher.  Of course (a) is blindingly obvious to anyone who understands the purpose of hand-washing, and (b) is obvious to anyone who has seen a public toilet; unfortunately "obviousness" seems to fail just about everyone I ever see in a public restroom.

Get Your ZZZs - Yes.  Admittedly, being self-employed makes this much easier, since pretty much the only thing that determines when I go to sleep and get up is "when I feel like it."