Monday, March 19, 2012

Eat Your Spinach


Mom always told us to eat our spinach. It will make us strong. We believed. We ate. And we walked away from the dinner table to gather our capes and plastic swords to battle the bad guys down the hallway. Good thing only my sisters lived at the end of the hallway because I ate a lot of spinach. Dad always said I would grow hair on my chest if I ate sardines.

"Now these will put hair on your chest," he said. I can still remember his smile as he bit the heads off at the dinner table, making my sisters run back down to the end of their hallways where I would later confront them with my spinach-bolstered bravery...er...knavery--with no hair on my chest.

Okay, so this blog entry has a point. Spinach. I love you Mom, but maybe moms have been known to be wrong about a few things--propagating healthy rumors that are nothing more substantial than rumor.

Knuckle cracking. Known as "KC" in the literature. Has Mom ever told you it will give you arthritis? Well I finally came across an elegant (elegant in every sense of the word) study by a physician who found KC does not cause arthritis.

For fifty years he diligently knuckle cracked his left hand at least twice a day. Yes, 50. He refrained from cracking his right hand during this time, and any crack on the right was unintentional. How he did this for fifty years amazes me because I always feel unbalanced if I crack only one side of any part of my body. But he cracked unilaterally, and diligently. And then he imaged his hands and compared the two, finding no evidence of arthritis in either hand, in fact, both hands showed similar joint space findings.

You can check out his paper here:

1 comment:

Martha said...

Thanks for putting my mind at ease Spennie. I too am a knuckle, hip and back popper. So no it will no longer be a guilty pleasure for me!