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Joe:
Thank you Shannon for your insights and I would like to move onto a fascinating excerpt from your book which outlines how to spot the scams on the net as we all search for that fountain of youth.

Promising the Moon:
Beware of Fad Diets, Outrageous Claims, and Magic
Excerpted from
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Health and Fitness
by Joan Price (http://www.joanprice.com)
and Shannon Entin (http://www.fitnesslink.com)
(Macmillan Computer Publishing, 1999)

The World Wide Web teems with useful weight-loss information, useless weight-loss misinformation, and a dogpile of advertisers trying to sell you tomfoolery disguised as the answer to your dreams. Greedy scoundrels feed on your desperation to lose weight, and they know that you’ll buy anything that promises to answer your prayers. The sad truth is that most of these products and diets lighten only your wallet.

What Do You Have To Lose?
People who are miserable about their weight are vulnerable to all sorts of scams and schemes. All scams take your money, but weight-loss scams take your dreams and your dignity. And sometimes your health. Weight loss fraud bilks Americans out of up to $40 billion a year.

Recognizing Quacky Diets and Weight Loss Schemes
You’ve heard it a million times: "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." When you relate this to weight loss, you can safely delete the "probably."

You can spot a quack diet
or weight-loss scheme — online and offline — because it appeals to your emotions, not your reason. There’s no mystery about how to lose weight. Increase your physical activity, decrease your calorie intake, make healthy food choices, avoid high-fat and high-calorie foods, and eat to fill physical, not emotional, hunger. Unless your genes fight you, that’s how to lose weight. No "special, breakthrough ingredient." No "millions of satisfied customers." No "amazing results."

• If you’re asked to send money
  for a diet, plan, or product, tuck that credit card back into your wallet. A book or a cassette tape might be worth buying if you’re satisfied with the credentials and expertise of the author, but there’s no magic bullet to put in your weight-loss gun. Anyone who is trying to sell you a magic bullet knows that, and doesn’t care about your weight, your self-esteem, your health, or anything but your money.
• Spotting the Scams: Weight Loss Red-Flags
  Want to know if you should buy those slimming insoles, natural algae patches, or inch-zapping, fat-blocking pills? Most weight-loss frauds are easy to spot once you know the signs.
• Be wary of testimonials
  (including photos, and/or undocumented case histories), pseudoscientific or misused medical terms, references to studies without specific citations, and claims that the product treats a whole slew of conditions.

Other dead giveaways
are these claims that online weight-loss schemes adore overusing:

• "Burns Fat"
  Nothing burns fat except exercising off excess calories. If you take in X calories and use up X+100 calories, those extra 100 have to come from somewhere, so they come from your fat stores. No product does this for you. Just eating less and moving more.
• "Gets Rid of Cellulite"
  Cellulite is just a fancy French name for body fat. Yeah, it has a different appearance — sort of like cottage cheese under the skin. That’s because the skin is thin in those areas, and the fat puckers up at you. You get rid of cellulite the same way you get rid of any other kind of body fat. No magic, sorry!
• "Without Diet or Exercise"
  You can’t lose weight without changing your diet and/or exercise. Period. Calories in, calories out. If you keep eating the kind or amount of food that piled on the pounds in the first place, and your exercise is limited to the remote control boogie, any pill, lotion, gadget or treatment that you can buy online will reduce only your checking account.

Bozo Buzzwords:
These buzzwords play on your dreams, not your reason:

• Magic:
  There’s no magic. If there were, we’d all have heard about it by now, and there would be no reason that a third of the population is overweight.
• Secret:
  Excuse me, but why would an honest-to-goodness weight-loss discovery be kept secret? Get real!
• Easy/ Effortless:
  The truth is it does take effort to watch your food and increase your exercise level. You wish it could be easy and effortless, but it just isn’t.
• Fast:
  Any diet or product that promises you’ll lose a pound a day or anything over a pound or two a week is yanking your chain. You can lose more water than that, but not more body fat.
• Guaranteed:
  A guarantee is as good as the company that stands behind it. Most people are too embarrassed to ask for their money back. Those that do are often ignored, or the company and Web site disappear. (Now there’s magic for you!)
• Permanent:
  Dream on, honey. How could weight loss be permanent when you eat every day?

Scam Test
Okay, here’s a test. Click on the NordiCaLite Web site: www.ari.net/nordicalite

Ready for a surprise! This isn’t even a real ad. And it’s not a real product. No, we didn’t make it up. The Federal Trade Commission was nice enough to put up the site to save you from yourself — although you don’t learn that until you click on "more" and then "save even more money!" to get to page 3. Their aim: "to raise awareness about the false and deceptive advertising claims made by many so-called ‘weight-loss’ products."

to the interview

Whole Wheat Linguini & Fresh Tuna
This week's Recipe of the Week features Whole Wheat Linguini and Fresh Tuna. We receive many letters from women and men looking to eat for health. They want their food to not only nourish them but to also make them feel better. Mood swings and bouts of irritability can be traced to what we eat.   The kind of foods and yes, the amounts, affect our temperaments. This recipe is from Molly Siple's best seller Recipes for Change.  This recipe goes a long way to satisfy hunger, load you up on important nutrients, and eliminate those mood sings and periods of irritability.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Health and Fitness
by Joan Price, Shannon Entin

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Health and Fitness shows you how to find, evaluate, and productively use information in all areas of health and fitness, including: exercise, diet, developing a fitness program, healthy cooking, weight loss, sports, fitness travel, kids' health, disease, mental health, and others. Authors Joan Price and Shannon Entin, health and fitness experts, guide you in learning about both health and fitness resources on the Internet. They steer you away from scams, frauds, and misleading advice, and towards the respectable, credible resources by showing you how to tell the difference.

The Glucose Revolution:
The Authoritative Guide to the Glycemic Index-The Groundbreaking Medical Discovery
by Jennie Brand Miller, Thomas M.S Wolever M.D. Ph.D., Stephen Colagiuri M. D., Ph.D.,Jennie Brand Miller, Thomas Wolever, Kaye Foster-Powell

At last, a diet book based on sound scientific research! The Glucose Revolution: The Authoritative Guide to the Glycemic Index--The Groundbreaking Medical Discovery, is written by respected Australian and Canadian nutrition experts, including two MDs and a Ph.D., who've spent the past 20 years researching the role of carbohydrates in a healthy diet. According to the authors, watching carbohydrate consumption is the key to a healthy diet. There's good reason the book has been endorsed by biggies in the medical field like Harvard's Dr. JoAnn Manson and integrative health guru Dr. Andrew Weil: the authors are acknowledged in the medical community as leading authorities on the topic and have published hundreds of articles in scientific journals before translating their findings here for us regular folks.

Richard Simmons
Sweat & Shout: An Aerobic Workout
by Richard Simmons

In this workout, formerly titled Sweatin' to the Oldies 4, Richard Simmons leads another spirited and playful dance party. He and his group of wildly happy followers dance energetically to songs like "Shout," "Dance to the Music," "Heat Wave," "Proud Mary," "Devil with a Blue Dress," and "Mony Mony." His group of exercisers is smaller this time, but the band is larger, sometimes including gospel singers. This workout is longer and somewhat more intense than in earlier Sweatin' videos, with some faster and more intricate steps. If you're a complete beginner, start with one of the earlier ones, but if you've already worked your way up through the first three, you're ready for this one.

The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet:
The Lifelong Solution to Yo-Yo Dieting
by Rachael F. Heller, Richard Ferdinand Heller

Filled with sound advice and effective strategies, a guide to putting the individual in charge of eating and weight--for life--includes recipes and menu plans from leading professionals in the field of carbohydrate addiction. The phenomenal New York Times national bestseller--now in an updated mass market edition. By offering "upbeat, positive advice for weight loss success" (Library Journal), the Hellers show how it's possible to correct the physically-based cause of carbohydrate addiction--suffered by 75 per cent of Americans--and experience easy, permanent weight loss.