I have discovered, through questioning the lovely people I work with, that at the bottom of every fear of eating too much, or of gaining too much weight, resides the fear of death. In the final analysis, it always comes down to this — the awareness that we have to die, someday, and that anything we do might hasten the inevitable. [...] Responding to your body requires admitting, first of all, that you have a body, that you are a body, that your head does not float on a metaphysical balloon somewhere just north your body, untouchable. This admission requires you to acknowledge that bodies die, and that you will die too. The separation of mind and body, soul and body, spirit and body, is itself a coping mechanism, a sort of immortality project. [...] My proposal is that we live in the way that best reflects how we most want to use our precious time, right here, right now. My proposal is that we live well despite our inescapable fear of death. Our time is valuable in more than one way, both in quantity and quality, and neither one should be sacrificed for the sake of the other. We may instead try, as best we can, to strike a balance between the two, and not go to extremes in an attempt to escape what we all know is coming — but neither to hasten it purposely by squandering what little we do have in a blaze of reckless glory. [...] Do the things you can reasonably do, without unduly burdening yourself, to be a good steward of the gift of life.

If you still want to make changes, understand that you are where you are not because you’re weak or you’re flawed, but because you’ve adapted to an environment that encourages you to drive instead of bike or walk, to watch TV instead of doing anything else. It’s a lot for three hours a week of gym time to counteract, Professor Wharton says. His suggestion is to go big. Don’t just swap half-and-half for skim milk, or take the stairs. Reorder your life to reflect your values and your priorities instead of just tinkering at the margins.

That MSG isn’t the poison we’ve made it out to be has been well-established. News stories are written regularly about the lack of evidence tying MSG to negative health effects. (Read here and here, for example. Or here, here, here, here and here.) Still, Yelp reviews of Chinese restaurants tell tales of racing hearts, sleepless nights and tingling limbs from dishes “laden with MSG.” Even when the science is clear, it takes a lot to overwrite a stigma, especially when that stigma is about more than just food.

For any discoveries that Murphy makes, the road ahead is paved with obstacles. Safety testing, animal testing, and then finally, the hope that a drug company and its investors can be persuaded to gamble hundreds of millions on the chemical passing the multiple stages of human clinical trials, before it can be turned into an over-the-counter product. The odds seem slim, but with the annual global mortality rate from antibiotic resistance predicted to hit 10 million in the next 35 years, scientists remain hopeful that the politicians will come to better agreements on how to finance antibiotic development. The question is, will they get around to doing so before it’s too late?

The weird, slightly grim history of the sensory deprivation tank.

A Q&A with an expert who studies the relationship between mental illness and violence.

A well-timed burst of businessfollowed by a well-earned restcan do wonders for your productivity. Here's how to put one foot in front of the other to...

You're an organism. And organisms run in cycles. Here's how to work with yours.

Studies in humans in Britain, Denmark, Canada and in the United States could find no association between saccharin consumption and bladder cancer once they accounted for cigarette smoking (which does cause it). Based on these newer studies, saccharin was removed from the carcinogen list in 2000. But by that time, opinions were set. It did little to make anyone feel safe.

My girlfriend is an opera singer and performance studies expert who has spent years working on breathing, so I asked her what to do next time. “[Breathlessness] is very normal and brought on by nerves,” she said. “And there's a simple exercise that fixes it.” For you, and for all those who might search Google for “running out of breath,” “breathing control,” and “reading for the radio,” I offer her opera-tested 4-step routine.

I was exercised by wolves. Here are all the secrets I learned along the way about the fitness industry’s lies.

Imbalances in the microbial community in your intestines may lead to metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes. What does science say about how to reset our bodies?

"The Hum" refers to a mysterious sound heard in places around the world by a small fraction of a local population. It's characterized by a persistent and invasive low-frequency rumbling or droning noise often accompanied by vibrations.

Patients With Autoimmune Hair Loss Have A High Rate Of Celiac Disease

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change

Rob Delaney: I so love my kids, I can be envious of my wife for carrying them when pregnant. But I care about her right to choose just as much

If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.

I overestimate the value of my official "workouts" and underestimate the value of walking as a means to an end. Americans lag behind the rest of the world in steps taken precisely because we travel so rarely for transportation's sake. Our cities are spread out (NYC excepted) and car culture is everywhere. A Centers for Disease Control study found that almost 40 percent of Americans had not walked for 10 straight minutes in the past week!

I’m saying that I would rather be in jail in a wheelchair with a body that doesn’t work than experience a severe episode of depression.

Better to listen to music that alternates between disquiet and devastation, over and over, with no respite. Anything else feels like a lie.

‘Internet addiction’ doesn’t exist. It can’t, because it’s a logical impossibility, a category error, and there’s no good evidence that heavy internet use, in itself, is a risk to mental health.

the mortality benefit of mammography is much smaller, and the harm of overdiagnosis much larger, than has been previously recognized.

A woman fakes cancer. My girlfriend Diane met Stephanie last October at a free makeup event for women with cancer called Look Good Feel Better.

2,546 votes and 863 comments so far on Reddit

This 10,000-rpm, no-pulse artificial heart doesn't resemble an organic heart--and might be all the better for it.

We can decline. We can change our patterns. Identity is far deeper than any of these labels and habits. We are not what we do, or even how we do it or why. We are what we feel. Identity is in the surge when you recognize unverifiable truth, or the pang when something snaps that you can't see, or the way you know that you love something you'd never even contemplated. We are not the sum of our fears or our atrophies or our helplessnesses, we are the product of our hopes and our surprise and our inexplicable instincts. We are broken as a test; we are repaired as a challenge. We contain divinity and infinity and infamy. We are beautiful under these terrible layers and clothes, in motion where we sit, warm in these climes, improvised in panic. We can walk away from the stories they're trying to sell us, and write our own. If they hang on us, we can throw them off. If they pursue us, we can run.

Humans may have used to sleep in two distinct periods.…the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.

Bottom-shelf products and home remedies/concoctions for cooking/cleaning/health/beauty/etc.

‘When it comes to IVF, in-vitro fertilization, nothing is normal. Your world is upside-down. Your doctor compliments your wife on her monkeys. Then, when every dollar and exertion has gone toward a single hour of hope, it begins to snow.’

An overview.