Come on, let’s be honest. You don’t have any more of a clue about matters of health than I do. You might think you’re savvy with all those pills and vitamins, dieting and sweat bands around your wrists and head, but you’re just hoping that stuff works. You’re praying that Nordic track gizmo under your bed has some kind of magic that will keep you fit. Please, lord, let this treadmill thing keep me alive!

I’ve been a skeptic in such matters ever since the 1980s when Jim Fixx died. Remember him? He was the running guru that got the jogging craze going in this country. Jim wrote books, ran like crazy and served as inspiration to a lot of overweight people who put on running shorts and fancy running shoes and started lumbering along the highways and byways.

Then, one day Jim Fixx was running and just dropped dead. He was 52. What killed him were blocked arteries. He was – wait for it! – GENETICALLY PREDISPOSED, said the medical specialists. Jim’s father died from a heart attack at an early age too.

So that event, plus my lifelong conviction that Dame Fortune is fickle, has left me a skeptic in matters of health. My formula is: FIXX + FORTUNE= BUS, the latter being that bus (literal or metaphorical) that comes skidding around the corner and hits you as you’re drinking your vitamin-enhanced smoothie or stepping out of the health food store with that sack of tasteless goodies.

(By the way, a literal application of my formula occurred just last week in the Chicago suburbs. A guy was crossing the street and was hit and killed by a bus. “He was such a nice guy,” the Chicago newspaper said in quoting a friend of the victim. Whether you’re a jerk or nice guy, fat or skinny, a teetotaler or boozer, when Dame Fortune is at the wheel, you’re toast when that bus comes around the corner.)

Thus, for a skeptic like me, when a piece of medical advice comes along that can’t miss, I get excited and want to share it. And I am: Use bacon for a nosebleed.

I have always believed bacon had magical properties and now I find out it has medicinal properties as well. According to the article I read last week, if you have a nosebleed take a piece of raw bacon, roll it up and stuff it in the offending nostril. It has something to do with the salt and the curing process of bacon that stops a nosebleed.

The whole thing makes me wish I were prone to nosebleeds. The smell of bacon frying is sublime; I can only imagine what it would be like to have a piece shoved up your nose. That must be heavenly.

So go ahead and eat your wheat germ, almonds and broccoli, all you health nuts, emphasis on nuts. Me, I’m keeping plenty of bacon handy. You know, in case of a medical emergency.

Bob Morgan is a retired, award-winning journalist and an author.