But the Spaniards, at least, are not taking the decline of the siesta lightly. In an effort to promote the importance of the siesta as a cultural tradition, a group called the National Association of Friends of the Siesta recently staged a national siesta championship in Madrid.

“The mission of the championship is to spread the idea that the nap is something of ours that must be defended and practised, because it is healthy and good for everyone,” said Andres Lemes, spokesman for National Association of Friends of the Siesta.

“The modern pace of life makes it difficult to take siestas any more,” he added. “But studies show it’s a healthy practice that recharges your batteries.”

Long live the siesta!

Photo credit: Hector Garcia via Wikimedia Commons.

Calling the jjimjilbang a bathhouse hardly begins to describe its attractions. “Here, you take a bath and a sauna,” said Kim Eun-yeong, 40, a frequent visitor to World Cup Spaland, one of the city’s largest jjimjilbang. “But you can also eat, sleep, date, watch television, read, play computer games. It’s one-stop total service in the Korean way of relaxing.” …

By the late 1990s, many bathhouses had turned into true recreation complexes, and going to one became as much a part of Korean social life as going to the movies. In 2006, there were more than 13,000 in the country, more than 2,500 of them in Seoul. Some can accommodate thousands of people…

At the front counter, customers pay about 8,000 won, or $7, pick up their top and shorts and a towel and enter the sex-segregated bath halls. There, for an extra fee, they can be scrubbed by a professional using exfoliating mitts.

From the bathing halls, patrons of both sexes dressed in the facility’s “uniform” step out into the common room, which usually looks like a mix of hotel lobby, giant living room and small shopping mall. Some jjimjilbang have karaoke rooms, concert halls, swimming pools, even indoor golf ranges, as well as cafeterias and rooms to watch videos.

But a jjimjilbang’s reputation owes much to its saunas. Some feature heated huts suffused with the aroma of mugwort (important in traditional medicine). Sometimes the walls are studded with jade and amethyst, which many Koreans believe emit healing rays when heated…

But the jjimjilbang are as important for socializing as they are for restorative treatments.

“We don’t consider someone a real friend until we take a bath together,” said Han Jae-kwan, 25, a college student.

His girlfriend, Yang Eun-jeong, 25, agreed: “We women also believe we become closer when we get naked and bathe together.”

The two were playing the board game Go after emerging from a sauna. Since most young Koreans live with their parents until they marry, jjimjilbang have become popular places for couples to spend time together.

“We often come here on a date,” Mr. Han said. “At a cafe, the owner gives you an unwelcome look after a few hours if you don’t order more. But here, you can stay as long as you want.”

Dr. Michalis Stagourakis has seen a transformation of his pediatric practice here over the past three years. The usual sniffles and stomachaches of childhood are now interspersed with far more serious conditions: diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. A changing diet, he says, has produced an epidemic of obesity and related maladies.

Small towns like this one in western Crete, considered the birthplace of the famously healthful Mediterranean diet – emphasizing olive oil, fresh produce and fish – are now overflowing with chocolate shops, pizza places, ice cream parlors, soda machines and fast-food joints.

The fact is that the Mediterranean diet, which has been associated with longer life spans and lower rates of heart disease and cancer, is in retreat in its home region. Today it is more likely to be found in the upscale restaurants of London and New York than among the young generation in places like Greece, where two-thirds of children are now overweight and the health effects are mounting, health officials say.

“This is a place where you’d see people who lived to 100, where people were all fit and trim,” Stagourakis said. “Now you see kids whose longevity is less than their parents’. That’s really scaring people.”

That concern has been echoed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which said in a report this summer that the region’s diet had “decayed into a moribund state.”

“It is almost a perfect diet, but when we looked at what people were eating we noticed that much of the highly praised diet didn’t exist any more,” said the report’s author, Josef Schmidhuber, a senior economist at the food organization. “It has become just a notion.”

Greece, Italy, Spain and Morocco have even asked Unesco to designate the diet as an “intangible piece of cultural heritage,” a testament to its essential value as well as its potential extinction.

The giant gates of Temple of Heaven Park swung open at 6 a.m., magnets pulling people into a new day. People quietly poured out of apartment buildings and low-slung hutong neighborhoods and drained through the gates of Beijing’s favorite morning gathering place.

Slowly the corners of the park filled, even the shady spots deep among the tight rows of cypress trees that date back 800 years. Over there, a man performed the slow-motion dance of tai chi. Over here, a woman scratched her back against a tree. Everywhere, people gave themselves pat-downs to loosen their muscles…

Here came a woman walking backward. There went a man furiously rubbing his head. Everyone made room for the man crawling down the sidewalk on his toes and hands. It is exercise without ego. There seems to be no way to move the body in a way that would draw puzzled looks here, although the bear-crawler elicited some second glances….

This is exercise to connect with the world around, not tune it out. This is exercise done to feel good on the inside, not to impress anyone on the outside.

Here are the vacation stats:

A global study by Expedia.com found that about a third of employed Americans usually do not take all the vacation days that they are entitled to, leaving an average of three days on the table. This is not so unusual. About a quarter of the workers in Britain do not take all their vacation time, and in France a little less. The only difference is that the British get an average of 26 days of vacation and the French about 37 — compared with our 14 days, Expedia.com said.

According to John de Graaf, executive director of Take Back Your Time, a nonprofit organization that studies issues related to overwork, 137 countries mandate paid vacation time. The United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t…

And the Conference Board, a private research group, said the number of Americans who said in April that they were going to take a vacation in the next six months is at a 30-year low.

That’s all well and good, you might be saying, but I can’t leave work for very long or I’ll be swamped when I return. Besides, how can I use all my vacation time if my boss or co-workers don’t use all of theirs? Well, now there are studies supporting the short and long-term health benefits of regular vacations.

(In one study) women who took a vacation once every six years or less were almost eight times more likely to develop coronary heart disease or have a heart attack than those who took at least two vacations a year…

The study, published in 1992, was controlled for other factors like obesity, diabetes, smoking and income, Ms. Eaker said, and the findings have been substantiated in follow-up research.

“It shows how the body reacts to a lifestyle of stress,” she said. “This is real evidence that vacations are important to your physical health.”

Another study, published in 2000, looked at 12,000 men over nine years who were at high risk for coronary heart disease. Those who failed to take annual vacations had a 21 percent higher risk of death from all causes and were 32 percent more likely to die of a heart attack.

Want more evidence? Here it is – but remember, the real health benefits go to those who take a real vacation, and not those who stay hooked up to work from the beach.

After a few days on vacation — and it usually took two to three — people were averaging an hour more of good quality sleep. And there was an 80 percent improvement in their reaction times.

“When they got home, they were still sleeping close to an hour more, and their reaction time was 30 to 40 percent higher than it had been before the trip,” Mr. Rosekind said.

The trick, these days when going on vacation, is not only to physically remove yourself from your normal routine, but mentally as well. Checking your BlackBerry every few hours or rushing to the nearest Internet cafe doesn’t cut it.

For 10 years, the Faculty of Management at Tel Aviv University has conducted a study looking at what is called “respite effects,” which measure relief from job stress before, during and after vacations.

Professor Dov Eden, an organizational psychologist who has conducted the study, found that those who are electronically hooked up to their office, even if they are lying on the Riviera, are less likely to receive the real benefits of a vacation and more likely to burn out.

For most of history, climate shaped the way people lived their everyday lives. In some of the world’s hottest places, people still take a midday siesta. But modern life is making that a rarity…

Even in the hottest climates, the midday siesta is a disappearing habit. With globalization, people work longer hours. Air-conditioning shields them from the heat. Many live in suburbs and farther away from where they work, which makes going home for a midday nap impractical.

Interestingly, just as the siesta is in decline, there is intriguing evidence that there may actually be health benefits to a mid-day nap.

“Napping is a response, an adaptation to the hot climate,” Trichopoulos says. “Siesta is a very pleasant habit. In a way, it doubles your day. Because you start all over again at 5 o’clock and you can go on until 11 or 12 o’clock which is not uncommon at all in our part of the world.”

Trichopoulos’ expertise is in cancer prevention. A courtly man at 68, he teaches both at Harvard and at the University of Athens. So he can’t help but notice the difference in the pace of life in Greece and in the United States.

“In the way life is organized here, you start with stress commuting,” he says. “And you finish with stress, which is again the commuting. So to have in the middle of the day a time when you can relax, it can only be good, or at least not bad.”

Trichopoulos looked specifically at whether taking a nap gives protection against heart attacks. The results were published earlier this year in an American medical journal. Greek men who napped at least 30 minutes a day were significantly less likely to die from heart attacks, compared with those who didn’t nap.

His theory is that napping helps reduce stress, which is known to increase one’s risk of heart attack. Trichopoulos cautions that more study is needed to confirm his findings – but he’s excited about the health implications.

Traveling through Europe recently, I’ve been able to confirm through personal experience what statistical surveys tell us: the perceived stature of Americans is not what it was. Europeans used to look up to us; now, many of them look down on us instead. No, I’m not talking metaphorically about our loss of moral authority in the wake of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. I’m literally talking about feet and inches…

The data show that Americans, who in the words of a recent paper by the economic historian John Komlos and Benjamin Lauderdale in Social Science Quarterly, were “tallest in the world between colonial times and the middle of the 20th century,” have now “become shorter (and fatter) than Western and Northern Europeans. In fact, the U.S. population is currently at the bottom end of the height distribution in advanced industrial countries.”

This is not a trivial matter. As the paper says, “height is indicative of how well the human organism thrives in its socioeconomic environment.”

Krugman notes that this is a bit of a puzzle because, although there is “normally a strong association between per capita income and a country’s average height,” that is evidently not the determining cause of this height shift since the U.S. still has a higher per capita GDP than other nations. So what is the cause? Well, that’s where it gets a bit depressing.

We seem to be left with two main possible explanations of the height gap.

One is that America really has turned into “Fast Food Nation.”

“U.S. children,” write Mr. Komlos and Mr. Lauderdale, “consume more meals prepared outside the home, more fast food rich in fat, high in energy density and low in essential micronutrients, than do European children.” Our reliance on fast food, in turn, may reflect lack of family time because we work too much: U.S. G.D.P. per capita is high partly because employed Americans work many more hours than their European counterparts.

A broader explanation would be that contemporary America is a society that, in a variety of ways, doesn’t take very good care of its children. Recently, Unicef issued a report comparing a number of measures of child well-being in 21 rich countries, including health and safety, family and peer relationships and such things as whether children eat fruit and are physically active. The report put the Netherlands at the top; sure enough, the Dutch are now the world’s tallest people, almost 3 inches taller, on average, than non-Hispanic American whites. The U.S. ended up in 20th place, below Poland, Portugal and Hungary, but ahead of Britain.

In short, Americans spend so many hours at work that they don’t devote enough time to family, physical activity and a good diet. If this is all true, then you might say that the work and task-oriented culture of the U.S. is now even affecting our height.

Avon, L’Oreal, Ponds, Garnier, the Body Shop and Jolen are selling lightening products and all of them face stiff competition from a local giant, Fair and Lovely, a Unilever product that has dominated the market for decades.

Fair and Lovely, with packaging that shows a dark-skinned unhappy woman morphing into a light-skinned smiling one, once focused its advertising on the problems a dark-skinned woman might face finding romance. In a sign of the times, the company’s ads now show lighter skin conferring a different advantage: helping a woman land a job normally held by men, like announcer at cricket matches. “Fair and Lovely: The Power of Beauty,” is the tagline on the company’s newest ad.

Some critics charge that the products reinforce colonial prejudices against darker skin, but many Asians counter that this is merely an age-old cultural preference.

Taking offense at the products is “a very Western way of looking at the world,” said Ashok Venkatramani, who is in charge of the skin care category at Unilever’s Indian unit, Hindustan Lever. “The definition of beauty in the Western world is linked to anti-aging,” he said. “In Asia, it’s all about being two shades lighter.” …

The idea of “glowing fairness” has nothing to do with colonialism, or idealization of European looks, Mr. Villanueva said. “It’s as old as India,” he said, and “deeply rooted in the culture.”

There’s no denying that the notion of “fairness,” as light skin is known in India, is heavily ingrained in the culture. Nearly all of Bollywood’s top actresses have quite pale skin, despite the range of skin tones in India’s population of more than a billion people.

Mey Mint struggles to carry her weight up the flight of stairs, her thighs shaking with each step. It will take several minutes for the 50-year-old to catch her breath, air hissing painfully in and out of her chest. Her rippling flesh is not the result of careless overeating, though, but rather of a tradition.

In Mauritania, to make a girl big and plump, ‘gavage’ _ a borrowed French word from the practice of fattening of geese for foie gras _ starts early. Obesity has long been the ideal of beauty, signaling a family’s wealth in a land repeatedly wracked by drought.

Mint was 4 when her family began to force her to drink 14 gallons of camel’s milk a day…By the time Mint was 10, she could no longer run. Unconcerned, her proud mother delighted in measuring the loops of fat hanging under her daughter’s arms.

The government launched a public health campaign to warn of the health risks of obesity. It has had some successes, although more in urban than in rural areas.

Only one in 10 women under the age of 19 has been force-fed, compared to a third of women 40 or older, according to a survey conducted by the National Office of Statistics in 2001, the most recent available.

Those still forced to eat were overwhelmingly from the country’s rural areas. But although the canon of beauty is changing, entrenched values are hard to uproot. “My husband thinks I’m not fat enough,” complained Zeinabou Mint Bilkhere.