text: lifting heavy things with the right form/putting ‘loads’ on my body regularly. Backpacking, or even just walking, yard work, cooking, carrying your children, and DIY projects are great for building this into your everyday life.
  Exposing myself to normal stressors like hunger, heat and cold (turn off the A/C, turn down the heat), sleeping on a firm surface on the ground (try the floor with a camp mat), walking on uneven paths vs flat, paved surfaces, and carrying/lifting heavy things. Try to use your body’s power as much as possible vs that of a machine. Hand tools and DIY are good for this (I love my Fiskars push reel mower; look for them used if you wanna pick one up cheap.) So is carrying your baby or groceries instead of using a stroller, car, or cart. These stressors help our bodies grow stronger and more resilient. I wonder how much of older people’s inability to live comfortably outside of a narrow temperature range, orthopedic footwear, and cushy thermo-foam-ic mattresses is related to a lifetime of coddling our bodies and removing the very stressors that keep us healthy. Movement expert Katy Bowman has many interesting things to say on this topic.
  exposing my eyes and body to frequent, incidental sunlight by trying to spend more time outside, and aiming for every-other-day sun exposure (while avoiding sunburns!) I live in the Pacific Northwest and have pale, northern European genes, so I’m probably safe in this mostly-cloudy climate, except perhaps in summer. If you are white and live in Texas, that’s not natural, and you probably need to take more precautions when outside. If you’re black and live in northern Sweden, you might need to get more sun exposure than usual.
  I would be especially cautious around introducing modern-unnatural things for kids, partly because brain development doesn’t even finish until we’re in our 20s. For me, that will mean convincing my wife to breastfeed our infant for as long as she can stand, no TV/phones/screens until our kids are at least a few years old (and minimizing it thereafter), no/minimal shoes, plenty of outside time, minimal sugar, lots of whole foods (chewing is good for jaw development), lots of playing, talking, reading, exercising, and socializing, and keeping them off drugs & alcohol at least until they’re into adulthood.
  I haven’t really talked about the mental aspect of modern living, but there are plenty of studies linking social media use to depression, and others that show that spending time in nature makes you happier, and maybe even (at least temporarily) smarter. A short walk around my tree-filled neighborhood always leaves me feeling more relaxed & positive.
  Nothing I’m suggesting about ‘living in accordance with nature’ is unscientific or meant in any hand-wavy, spiritual way (although if living with nature is comforting to you spiritually, there’s nothing wrong with that!) I’m merely pointing out that our bias should be to assume that many aspects of the environment that human genes have developed in are likely to be important to our health. The absence of these environmental factors (sunlight), or the presence of new modern ones (cigarettes), should be viewed with extreme suspicion when we try to figure out where the diseases of modernity have come from.
  If our ancestors didn’t suffer from low back pain, lung cancer, obesity, and nearsightedness like we do, and if we can see all of those diseases rising dramatically over the course of a few generations, it’s obvious that the cause is environmental, and that we should look to alter our environment (or stop altering it so much) as the easiest, cheapest, and most reliable fix. Sometimes that might come from technological ‘nature replacements/enhancements’ (vitamins & vaccines), and sometimes it might come from eschewing certain modern ‘conveniences’ (digital screens & Nike running shoes.)
  ‘Found in nature’ doesn’t of course mean ‘beneficial’. Plenty of things can kill you in the wild, and not all practices by prehistoric peoples will be good ones (although they are unlikely to be catastrophic to the species, otherwise those peoples would not have been our ancestors.) We know that there are negative side effects to consuming certain compounds propounded as medicine by primitive peoples (like those who call themselves “naturopaths”), and that it appears to be far safer to isolate the beneficial chemicals as pharmaceuticals in many instances.
  Unnatural products can be hugely beneficial when the costs of doing nothing are large, and sometimes they simply mimic nature
  Vaccines trigger our natural immunity response to build anti-bodies to fight deadly diseases, and they’ve saved millions of lives from polio, small pox, and the flu. Penicillin is probably the greatest life-saving drug in the history of the world. (Penicillin on Wax is probably the greatest 90s rap album cover in the history of the world.)
  Vitamins and the fortification of foods to eliminate nutritional deficits have helped children grow up healthy and strong. Iodine in salt prevents goiters. Vitamin D helps make up for our modern lack of sunshine. Of course, those deficiencies were often the result of us removing the vitamins and nutrients in the first place by, say, replacing nutritious whole wheat and brown rice with the nutrient poor, and more fattening, white, processed versions.
  Chlorine in our water prevents deadly pathogens from poisoning us, and fluoride in the trace amounts found in toothpaste protects our teeth from all the sugar & soda we’ve added to our diets. (There’s some controversy on fluoride in the water. I’m speaking here about real medical experts debating the optimal amounts and methods to get fluoride onto our teeth, not the tin-foil hat variety that considers fluoride a government plot akin to chemtrails.)
  Many other modern procedures that extend life in extreme circumstances are highly desirable like heart surgeries or knee replacements. This class of costly modern interventions are probably best used when the downsides of not using them are clear and dramatic (you will die/not walk otherwise), not when the upsides are fuzzy and marginal (you agree to risky back surgery for low back pain, rather than utilize the most natural and safer option of weight loss & physical therapy.)
  Many of our modern inventions (contact lenses, say, or orthopedic shoes) may just be band-aids to problems of our own making that could be better solved by getting at the root cause earlier, and avoiding the need for a technical ‘fix’ later.
  Some fixes might be worse than doing nothing. Blood-letting is a medieval example. Widespread prescriptions of addictive opioid painkillers is a modern one.
  Get out there into the fresh air and sunshine and use your body like nature intended. Expose yourself to more of life’s useful stressors. Carry and breastfeed your babies if you can (but don’t sweat the breastfeeding too much if you can’t; modern formula is very good!) Change your diet to eat more whole foods and cut back on booze, tobacco, and sugar. Wear minimalist shoes, and spend some time without cushy furniture.
  
  The Görliwood brand is continuously gaining in importance since 2012. Due to numerous successful film productions (e.g. Grand Budapest Hotel, Inglourious Basterds or Werk ohne Autor) and the award of the city of Görlitz as Europe's best film location of the decade, the expectations of the film city are rising.
  
  In 1886, the world of engagement rings forever changed when Tiffany & Co. introduced their revolutionary Tiffany® Setting, a 6-prong solitaire ring design.
  At that time, prong settings were unheard of because diamonds were usually set in bezel settings. Yet, this innovative ring design not only offered a secure mounting, it also raised the diamond higher in the setting and allowed more light to pass through for better brilliance.
  Till this day, the Tiffany ring setting and its symbolic turquoise blue box makes Tiffany & Co. one of the most recognizable brands in the jewelry industry. As a testament to their success, most of the solitaire ring designs you see in the current market are actually “inspired” from the original Tiffany Setting.
  In this review of Tiffany & Co, we will solely focus on their diamond engagement rings and reveal some of the shocking findings we discovered.
  Whether you want to shop in a branded jewelry boutique store or want to shop online, it pays to do prior research. Make sure you read our proven step-by-step method of choosing a diamond. I guarantee it’ll save you money and help you make smarter purchasing decisions.
  Unknown to many people, Tiffany pre-screens their diamonds in order to maintain a level of consistency in their selections. Now, this is a common practice that can be found in many other branded jewelry stores like Cartier and Harry Winston as well.
  Based on the information I garnered from their sales brochures and their sales representatives, the worst diamond quality that Tiffany carries in-store is I color and SI1 clarity.
  Speaking from a gemological perspective, I want you to understand that there’s nothing wrong with diamonds in the lower color grades. In fact, it is a matter of personal preference and tastes. I know many readers in the western countries actually prefer to wear warm colored diamonds (e.g. J or K colored). And if you happen to be one of these people, you probably can’t find something of your liking at Tiffany.
  Besides color and clarity, Tiffany also takes into account some other factors when filtering their diamonds. For example, if a diamond is deemed to have “strong” or “very strong” fluorescence, the stone is automatically rejected by their grading lab.
  Personally, I find fluorescence to be an awesome gemological property and I absolutely love diamonds with fluorescence. However, I do understand Tiffany’s stand to “err on the side of caution” rather than to sell diamonds that may look milky/hazy as a result of fluorescence.
  Even though Tiffany may choose to sell diamonds with better color/clarity, it doesn’t make the cut quality of their diamonds necessarily better than diamonds you can get from other jewelers.
  Yikes! When buying diamonds, the grading report is an important piece of document because it tells you the quality of the diamond you are paying for. The thing about Tiffany is that they grade their diamonds via an in-house laboratory and that may throw some people off.
  If you had read my article on grading laboratories, you will know that I frown upon jewelers who use their own grading certificates instead of getting their diamonds graded at neutral 3rd party gemological labs like GIA or AGS. The reason is simple; you want an impartial opinion of the diamond’s properties from a lab where there is no conflict of interests.
  Since Tiffany does not use external grading laboratories to grade their diamonds, there is no objective 3rd-party analysis of their diamond’s cut grading. Basically, Tiffany expects you to take them for their word on whatever they say about their diamonds. In contrast, two of the most reliable labs in the world, GIA and AGS, utilize well-vetted systems to assign diamond cut grades based on scientific studies.