Personal and healthy

I'll admit it, I'm morbidly fascinated by Jane Brody's NYT "Personal Health" column. This comes as no surprise to regular readers of this blog.

A brief explanation: Jane Brody's column is a health column, but it is also personal. Very personal. If it didn't happen to her, to her friend, to her friend's neighbor, or to one of her friend's neighbor's many cats, it's not a health problem worth writing about. The best health advice is common sense, preferably in the form of a quote from someone with an M.D. And many health problems and social ills are the result of too much television and too few whole grains. Finally, the further you stray from Brody's own lifestyle, the more likely you are to be in a real mess.

Let me say once and for all that I have nothing against Brody herself, nor do I believe that her health advice is unsound. I simply do not understand what use the Times has for a columnist whose way of drawing in the reader is to talk about herself and her family for the first few paragraphs, her friends and acquaintences for the next few, only to get to the "health" part of her column near the end of it, at which point she administers reasonable advice in a smug tone.

This week, Brody jumps on the baby-horror-story bandwagon, telling us about her newborn grandson, who's healthy, but it was a close call.

She begins: "Thanksgiving Day was fraught with fear and anxiety for my family and me."

As this is Brody, the obvious follow-up sentence would be, "The turkey wasn't lean enough, and the pumpkin pie crust wasn't whole wheat, and there was a football game on in the background." But the follow-up ends up being that her grandson was briefly ill but is now fine.

The lesson learned? "My experience with this otherwise perfect birth and baby reaffirmed my belief that all babies should be born in well-equipped hospitals, with neonatologists at the ready and a neonatal intensive care unit down the hall." I'd have thought she'd be in favor of babies being born at rock concerts in makeshift huts made out of empty kegs, in a second-hand-smoke-filled atmosphere, but I stand corrected.