Michael French

Santa Fe offers a wide array of gyms and fitness studios for every budget and in locations all over town. Whether you're looking for fitness classes, serious weight training, or a full-service gym with pools and steams rooms, you'll find it in Santa Fe.

For decades, nutrition watchdog groups have advised consumers not to ignore the "fine print" on food ingredient labels. Milder than the warning on cigarette packages, food labels nevertheless try to make us aware of certain dangers. Just when consumers finally started to pay attention, demanding that the marketplace provide more organic and non-processed foods, the deepest recession in sixty years has proved a set back to smart eating. As consumers cut back on spending, many buy the least expensive-and often the least healthy-products in the supermarket. Such choices can be shortsighted. You might have a restricted food budget, but what price tag can you put on long term health?

The VMS (vitamins, minerals and supplements) industry is $25 billion strong nationwide, recession proof, and thanks to aging Boomers and an increasingly health-conscious America, growing about six percent a year, according to the Huffington Post. In Santa Fe, which may be more health-crazed than most cities, the VMS business is booming at Wal-Mart, CVS and Walgreens, and particularly at specialty stores. Industry growth depends on either marketing new products or new research on existing products or, at the store level, having informed and knowledgeable salespersons.

What's popular in Santa Fe?

Move to Santa Fe and it's not long before you hear of someone who's suffering from allergies-juniper, elm, and oak in the spring, chamisa in the fall. You sympathize and are grateful this is not you. You have never had allergy issues back in New York, and with your strong immune system (New Yorkers are immune to almost everything), it's doubtful you ever will. Flash forward a few years, and after a particularly long, wet winter, you suddenly wake one windy morning with tightness in your chest, your throat is filled with mucus, your sinus cavities are bloated, and your eyes won't stop itching. Soon, you're telling newcomers that it's not if but when they, too, will be struck by an airborne plague that makes your daily existence as much fun as a kidney stone.

For those of us who eat breakfast out, especially (like mom said) if we consider it the most important meal of the day, we are picky about our restaurants. For both locals and visitors, the criteria can be the fresh, organic ingredients, the inventiveness or depth of the menu, the atmosphere, the price, or just a place that’s so unassuming and convenient that it feels like home.