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On this page are discussed a number of relatively minor health matters - not cancer, heart attacks, or stroke, because I have no experience with those. Be aware that some of the things discussed here will be offensive to some people. If you are one of those people, please go away. You need not send nasty comments, I am already aware of most of them. On the other hand, if you have comments, corrections or references that will make the page better, my contact link is at the end of the page.
Vegetables
Constipation is blockage of the bowel (intestine) making it difficult and perhaps painful to "do a number two." One of the problems in talking about it is that people use words which are offensive to others or just won't talk about it perhaps connecting discussion to those embarrassing times when a child thinks talking about their "poo-poo" is just great and does it in all the wrong places. So lets pin down some words that should be fairly neutral and moderately medical to continue. Your bowel is inside the body and is roughly the stomach, large and small intestine. When you eat, your teeth and stomach break up the food and chemically dissolve it, then push it into the large and small intestines to get as much liquid and nutrients out of it as possible. The result should be a more or less solid medium brown mass that is ejected into the toilet as a bowel movement. To aid discussion, I will use the word "turd" for each piece of the movement - what you pick up after the dog goes in the yard are turds (which my spell checker does like.)
Condoms are thin tubes closed at one end that a man puts
over his erect penis to block his sperm from getting into a woman when they are
engaged in sexual intercourse and to block any sexually transmitted diseases
(STDs) he or she might carry from reaching the other. gonorrhea, syphilis,
HIV and several other diseases They have been used for centuries, perhaps
millennia. In olden days, they were made from thin tubes of animal flesh -
like lamb intestine. Today they are made of various forms of rubber or
plastic, most often latex, which is a natural rubber that comes as a liquid that
will make a thin film on a mold. Condoms are sold in drug stores, grocery
stores, and restrooms of gas stations in packages from 1 to dozens.
From my own experience growing up, getting one hands on a condom and carrying it
around was an admission you wanted to do something sinful or at least forbidden.
This included buying condoms (rubbers, preventives, etc.) from a woman clerk in
a drug store which is one reason why they were sold in gas station bathrooms -
and those dispensers had garish words related to "ecstasy" and "paradise."
Worse, the dirtier the restroom, the greater number of machines on the wall.
And if dating a girl, having a condom along took away the "romance" because if
you were prepared, you just wanted to date her for sex not love.
Everything eased for a while when women got control of pregnancy with the pill,
but recent years have seen a huge backlash where sex offender laws treat sex
between consenting teenagers as criminal if they are 16 & 18 (but not if they
are 14 &15) just like depraved adult men who prey on 6 year old girls.
Right now, with the huge emphasis on abstinence from sex as the best and only
method to be discussed in school, teachers are forbidden to talk about condoms,
unless they say they have a 15% failure rate and heaven forbid they should show
via pictures, on a model or on their fingers, how they are to be used.
What isn't said by the people pushing abstinence is that teaching it has
absolutely no effect on how kids behave according to careful studies - all the
money spent on courses and materials doesn't delay the average age for first
time intercourse or reduce diseases or pregnancy in teenagers. They demand
an overall figure for condoms (15% includes slipping off and breaking) and won't
give similar figures for abstinence.
Many people are convinced that teaching about sex and prevention of pregnancy
and disease is going to incite teenagers to go out and experiment, so nothing is
taught. Texas has one of the most repressive programs, strongly favoring
abstinence, and has one the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country.