YOU don't eat right.

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. -- wes]

I finally have the osteoarthritis I've long expected. This is mildly annoying. But it's not a total disaster thanks to glucosamine.

This brings to mind one of my pet theories. I have a theory that you don't eat right. Actually the theory is none of us do, but I like to say YOU don't eat right, because I want to maintain my creds as a certified public annoyance.

The theory goes like this. Humans evolved over millions of years to eat what they could back before the last Ice Age forced them to invent throwing big rocks in order to eat the giant hairy elephants, because everything else went south.

So what were apes with barely any hair, dull teeth, no claws, and flimsy sticks able to catch? Well for one thing they had prehistoric broccoli. Prehistoric broccoli tasted worse than now and it was tougher. There was no broccoli "head," it was all stem. So your Mama chewed it all day before giving you any to eat. This is when the expression, "no dessert until you eat your broccoli" really meant something.

In those times "dessert," of course, meant protein. As rice and beans had not been invented yet, and as cows, pigs, etc. were too big, fast, pointy or bitey to catch, protein generally meant eat your bugs and grubs. Even lame humans can catch bugs and grubs. Bugs and grubs are a great source of protein.

And here's the beauty of it, and why I'm bringing it up now. Bugs and grubs are also a fantastic natural source of glucosamine. So the theory goes, we are all coming down with arthritis in our not so old age because we aren't eating what we evolved over millions of years to eat. Instead of eating our glucosamine laden bugs and grubs we're eating cows.

And we aren't even eating the parts of the cows that might help. We are having butchers cut the cartilage off our cows so that chemists can process it and resell it to us as chondroitin and mix it at high cost into our glucosamine pills.

Excuse me. YOU are having the butchers do that. I just eat at McDonald's. Do they even have butchers anymore?