This morning we'll nibble through Today's Diet & Nutrition, a quarterly from Great Valley Publishing Co. in Spring City, Pennsylvania. The company also publishes Today's Dietitian Magazine, a trade publication.

Today's Diet & Nutrition is edited and written very much for women, and about half of the editorial is non-food-related. The cover lists the major departments: health, nutrition, fitness, lifestyle and cuisine. The magazine is a bit of a nagger about eating right, exercising right and living right. It's to the editors' credit that they make the nagging interesting and even fun.

I've been looking through the Winter 2006 issue, and found some of the non-food stuff quite entertaining. Under "Fitness," there's a fascinating article called "The Trapeze Workout." Apparently a bunch of trapeze workout establishments have opened up in major metropolitan areas like New York, Baltimore, Boston and (of course!) Los Angeles, fueled by a 2003 episode of Sex in the City in which a character from the show did a workout at Trapeze School New York. At these places you do trapeze stunts under the supervision of an instructor a couple of dozen feet off the ground, but protected by harnesses and nets. The article contains an understatement by the owner of a California trapeze facility: "Working out in the gym is boring. Flying on the trapeze is not boring." Benefits of a trapeze workout are supposed to include improvements in muscular strength, flexibility, posture and coordination.

You'll also find an article in this issue about the health and psychological benefits of friendship. The article suggests that having close friends to kvetch with can even help you conquer cancer! Commenting on a study of cancer patients, author Carol Patton makes the interesting observation:

Friendships outside an individual's own family seem to have more power. The same study revealed that the relationships participants had with their children or other relatives didn't have a significant impact on their lifespan.

Today's Diet & Nutrition can drive you crazy with all the studies its authors cite about whether a particular foodstuff (tea, alcohol, dried beans - you name it) is good or bad for you. But it does do a good job when its focus is on food alone. This issue has a nice cover article on several "comfort food" dishes, including chicken pot pie, baked macaroni and cheese and that old comfort standby, meatloaf. You get a history lesson on each as well as clear and fairly simple recipes.

My favorite ad in the issue is for a line of sprouted whole grain pastas under the brand name "Ezekiel 4:9." Naturally, I had to look it up:

Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.

I think after just a couple of days of eating thereof I'd be ready for a burger and fries, or at least a pastrami sandwich.