The results of a 35-year study about health are in. If you want to remain healthy, you need to “follow five simple rules – eat well, work out, drink less, keep [your] weight down and never smoke.”

It took 35 years to figure this out? We’ve always known that lifestyle, diet, exercise and not smoking enhance health. I wonder how much money was spent on this study over a 35-year period. Who cares since it’s always fun to spend other people’s money.

For nearly a century “physical culture” was a big part of our nation’s health history. Magazines, exercise equipment, and supplements have been sold by the millions. I knew this stuff when I was 12 years old, and I can assure you that’s more than 35 years ago.

Eugene Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture was established in 1898 and carried articles that covered the same “five simple rules.”

I could have given the same advice in a fifteen-minute interview for free, but then how would bureaucrats be able to justify their jobs?

Jack LaLanne, Charles Atlas, Joe Weider, Bob Hoffman, and many others, even Jane Fonda, were preaching the benefits of exercise, diet, and moderation for decades, and it didn’t cost taxpayers a penny.

The ‘Jumping Jack’ was named after LaLanne. He was 96 when he died, and he could do stuff like this:

“To commemorate the ‘Spirit of ’76,’ United States Bicentennial, he swam one mile (1.6 km) in Long Beach Harbor. He was handcuffed and shackled, and he towed 13 boats (representing the 13 original colonies) containing 76 people.”

Let’s consider cigarettes. Cigarettes weren’t called “coffin nails” for more than a century because they were a good substitute for real nails.

Take a look at the “Cigarette Fiend” postcard from 1917.

You’re a slave of Madame Nicotine
Whose poisonous spell never fails

To land her victim in his grave
On her diet of Coffin nails.

There was no multi-million-dollar study needed to know that smoking is bad.

In the seventeenth century, the noxious weed was relegated to the pits of hell by King James I. He denounced smoking as “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

Without even reading the statistics about tobacco-related illnesses, a person knows that smoking cannot be good for the body. The first time a young person inhales, his body reacts by coughing. It’s a sure sign that the body is rejecting the harmful smoke. If inhalation persists despite the body’s early warning system, nausea takes over. Then there is the label on the side of every pack that states emphatically that you will probably get cancer if you keep smoking.

Politicians are always ready, willing, and able to spend our money while always whining that there’s no place to cut spending.