Can you be healthy without trying? Without exercising? Probably not optimally. But inside this article we’ll cover 17 ideas that will improve your health that won’t take any more effort than what you’re currently doing.
So, my wife and I live near a 33-hectare public park, and there’s a tiny lake on it (maybe closer to a large pond), and there are many McMansions like this:
Our family likes to look at the little turtles, and the baby Geese, and the ducks.
On this walk, it was recycling day, and I was telling my wife about this horrible story I read that people like to go through other people’s trash to get a better glimpse of who they are. (Seinfeld has an episode of going through someone’s medicine cabinet.)
Anyways, it was completely ironic that later that walk, I couldn’t help but notice a huge empty 3L bottle (nearly a gallon) of Unico Vegetable oil out on the top of someone’s recycling bin.
It honestly shocked me. That someone with a 4 million dollar property, who would clearly have the money to buy near-limitless amounts of traceable extra virgin olive oil from Italy, would instead be buying the most processed, and unhealthy of oils to ingest into their bodies.
What is vegetable oil?
“SOYBEAN OIL AND/OR CANOLA OIL AND/OR CORN OIL.”
Even the manufacturer isn’t sure about what it is. Anyways, here are a few quick reasons to avoid this stuff:
- 2019 study: “Recent literature suggests that the dietary imbalance between high omega-6 (n6) and low omega-3 (n3) polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) intake, characteristic of the Western diet (average ratio 15:1), leads to development of fatty liver disease.”
- 2015 study: “A high-fat diet rich in corn oil reduces spontaneous locomotor activity and induces insulin resistance in mice.”
- 2015 study: “Soybean Oil Is More Obesogenic and Diabetogenic than Coconut Oil and Fructose in Mouse: Potential Role for the Liver”
- 2010 study: “ingestion of meals rich in n-6 polyunsaturated vegetable oil irrespective of whether it has been mildly thermally oxidized may acutely alter the state of the vascular endothelium”
The vascular endothelium are the cells that line your veins and arteries and plays a huge role in blood vessel health (in other words, stroke, diabetes, heart disease, etc.)
Anyways, it got me to thinking that money alone can’t make someone make the right choices. It’s complicated, and many people, like I used to be, are completely clueless about how what we eat affects our health.
And funnily enough, there are things good for our health that don’t even cost *anything.*
17 Hacks To Be Healthier Without More Effort
Okay, so what are some things money can fix?
- Cooking oil. Buy the highest quality virgin olive oil. If you can, buy it from a specialty shop and have it auto-deliver every so often.
- Cooking pans. Teflon is linked to infertility and bad health. (2009 study) The best pans are still up for debate, as bare metal might not be ideal. But it’s still eons better than eating PFAS. Cast iron leeches iron into food, which is bad. My family cooks with All-Clad USA Made Stainless steel. It’s not perfect, but I haven’t found something better. Borosilicate baking glass might be best but then you’re baking 100% of the time.
- Water quality. Get spring-water or mineral water delivered in glass bottles from a spring more North of you (deuterium matching.) Avoids the contaminated public water sources while improving mineral intake (like magnesium, which plays a huge role in health, like avoiding Alzheimer’s.) Believe it or not, but there’s the Teflon ingredient found in public tap water at a toxic level more often than we’d like.
- Meat. Buy pasture-raised 100% grass-fed meat. They’ll have higher levels of beneficial compounds, a better omega-3 ratio, etc. New research is showing that pasture-raised meat has comparable amounts of beneficial compounds in meat as compared to veggies. Make your meat eat your veggies. (2021 study)
- Wild fish. Farm-raised fish need to take antibiotics to protect them from fish lice. And in the case of salmon, farmed salmon are fed coloured food pellets made of soybeans and red dye (source) to get the pink colour (instead of it coming from wild shrimp and krill.)
- 100% Organic food. Organic food generally requires less pesticides and contains more nutrients per gram.
- Storage containers. Buy glass and ditch the plastic.
- Traditional Sauna. Sauna use will help cardiovascular health through heat-shock proteins and don’t take much effort to sit in them.
- Air filtering. Hepa filters improve indoor air quality by removing dust, dust mites, nitrogen oxides from cooking, etc. (Study, Study, Study)
- Sleep. Did you know that flame retardants are often added to mattresses? The rich have a lot of options to investigate here, including organic rubber topped with wool coverings. They can buy linen sheets (weird study that real linen improves well-being while in a hospital). Then they can avoid the fire retardants, metal springs, etc.
- Any type of furniture. Most high-end brands don’t have flame retardants. They use real wood instead of resin with chipboard (which has VOC off-gassing) and less toxic finishes.
In 2012, Ikea told a CBC program (the government-sponsored television and radio channel in Canada) that:
“With regards to our sofas, we have a North American range and therefore adhere to the California standard on fire safety. We recognize that there is a challenge in balancing the need for fire protection with our quest to deliver products that are free from hazardous or questionable substances.”
What’s a bigger risk to our health? Fire or daily cancerous chemical exposure? (I’d rather opt for fire risk, personally.) Strangely, almost every high-end brand I’ve looked at have always omitted these chemicals.
Free Ways Of Being Healthy Without More Effort
Even if you’re on a tight budget, there are free ways to improve your health that costs next to no energy.
- Sleep with the window open for fresh air.
- Sit outside in the sunshine every day. (Eat breakfast on your balcony, porch, etc.)
- Sit in the sunshine, take off your eyeglasses and close your eyes and let the sunshine hit your face. (Minor UV stress prevents nearsightedness progression through better eye health, study. And infrared seems to fight cataracts and age-related macular degeneration, 2008 study)
- For the same reasons above, consider ditching your sunglasses (unless the context makes sense: you’re a pilot, at high-altitude snowboarding, etc.)
- Sleep at least 7.25 hours (and likely more.)
- Turning down the brightness on your TV, shifting the colours to “Warm” and removing the TV from your bedroom (TV in the bedroom is linked to gaining 5 pounds of fat over 18 months—NIH study.) This removes the harmful blue light at night.
That’s just a short selection off the top of my head. I’m sure there are a lot more ways that I’ve forgotten. (And some that I am unlearned about that you could silently judge me on.)
Anyways, those are some ways to improve your health just by switching some things in your life.
If you want to put in some more effort to get an incredible body, become lean, and optimally healthy, consider joining our exercise, diet, and lifestyle program that we’ve called True Gains.
