When the dermatologist burned off a bit of basal cell skin cancer from my left forearm in May 2013, he said one out of two people get more and need to get that burned off as well.

One out of two, oddly enough, also became the rate of his prognostications.I did get more basal cell, but the doc did not burn it off. Because it returned to the same spot, he decided the cancer needed to be cut out, so he referred me to a plastic surgeon.No biggie.The procedure was performed without any sedation and only required seven stitches. I did my normal bike ride the next day and took third place in an extremely hard and hilly bicycle race southeast of Pittsburgh a day later.So why retell such a ho-hum tale? Because one part of the ho-hum that happened before the surgery actually made me go "Hmm?"When I created a list of the daily supplements I take for the plastic surgeon's office and totaled up the different ingredients.The garden-variety antioxidant formula I use has beta-carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E and one selenium. The sports-specific one contains grape seed extract, gotu kola extract, L-glutathione, superoxide dismutase, ginkgo bilboa, vinpocetine - and a bit of vitamin C.One supplement designed to reduce muscle fatigue, increase workload capacity, and enhance recovery contains too many ingredients to list: a total of 17. So does another formulated to mitigate the joint discomfort I sometimes experience as a result of fracturing my femur and pelvis in separate bicycle crashes years ago.It has 15.I went "Hmm" after writing down these ingredients and the others in another bottles because it occurred to me how potentially counterproductive writing about my list of 12 total products with 70-plus ingredients could be. You might think that you need to take that much stuff to have good health.And you'd be wrong.The truth is that many of the supplements I take are not needed to insure good health. But they do help produce high-level athletic performance two or three times a week and recover quicker from it - as well as lessen the chance of injury or overtraining from the 15 to 20 hours of working out (stretching is included in that amount) I do nearly every week.So what do you really need - if not those dozen supplements - to improve your present state of health?Small changes. Simple, small changes can really enhance your health. For example, if you do nothing more than remove 1.5 ounces of processed meat from your diet, and replace it with a handful of nuts, you can reduce your risk of death by up to 17 percent.Mercedes Sotos-Prieto offered that small change to Carl Nierenberg for his article, "Eat Better, Live Longer? Small Food Changes Make a Difference," which can be accessed at Live Science.com. Sotos-Prieto, an assistant professor of food and nutrition science at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and the lead author of a recent study published by the New England Journal Of Medicine, did so to make the end result of the study quite clear.What seems to be minor can often be major in matters of health.In the aforementioned study, researchers reviewed the data from two prior studies that had nearly 75,000 health professionals complete comprehensive food questionnaires every four years during a 12-year period. The researchers then scored each of the subject's three questionnaires using three of the best diet plans - the Alternate Health Eating Index, the Alternate Mediterranean Diet, and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (aka the DASH Diet) as their guide.After doing this, they found that a 20 percentile increase in a subject's score over the 12 years correlated to an up-to 17 percent reduction in risk of death.Since "a 20 percentile increase in food scores" means little to the layman, Sotos-Prieto supplied Niereenberg with the exchange-of-processed-meat-for-nuts example.While prior studies featuring modest dietary change recorded similar reductions in the risk of death, a more recent one published last spring in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition offered a reason why. Quite simply, a single dietary change seems to serve as the gateway to greater overall health.Researchers theorized that after they had 11 overweight or obese subjects strive to limit themselves to only 8 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverages a day. To help achieve this, the 11 took three classes and total of 11 interactive and instructive phone calls over a six-month period.By the end, the 11 had not only reduced their intake of sugary beverages by a third, but other positive things also occurred.Their overall intake of total added sugars - even though the reduction of this was not stressed - also decreased by a third. Something else left unstressed dropped significantly as well.Total daily caloric intake.On the average, 285 fewer calories a day were consumed. And even though total calories were down, the amount of vegetables and whole grains the 11 consumed actually went up.