If there was ever a cancer that desperately needed an awareness month, it’s colon cancer. That month, thankfully, is March. About 140,000 people are diagnosed and 50,000 die from colorectal cancer each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making it the second-leading cause of cancer deaths among cancers that affect both men and women. Still, as many as one half of Americanswho should be getting colon cancer… Read More >>

Could be they've got too much time on their hands, but researchers sifted though 10 million geotagged tweets to determine the  happiest and saddest American places. Happy: Hawaii! Napa Valley! Sad: Louisiana; Beaumont, Texas!  So how'd they decide?  According to The Atlantic, researchers at the Vermont Complex Systems Center  (PDF) assigned a happiness quotient to tweeted words.  Rainbow… haha, sleep, and Read More >>

Forget warm milk and counting sheep: One of the best ways to guarantee a night of soothing, restful sleep may be to exercise more, according to the new 2013 Sleep in America poll. The extensive survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by the National Sleep Foundation found that while exercisers and non-exercisers slept roughly the same amount of time each night, the… Read More >>

Bad news for couch potatoes and those of us chained to our office cubicles. We’ve been hearing for a while now that sitting is the new health villain to worry about, but lately the studies are really piling up. Worse, exercise seems to have little mitigating effect—even if you put in some solid gym time, it may not make up for being sedentary the rest of… Read More >>

If mealtimes are a battle, with your kid happily gobbling up the pizza but leaving the salad, you could be to blame. New research suggests your diet during pregnancy could determine whether you end up with a picky eateror one who favors a more balanced diet. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia found that children whose mothers ate plenty of fruits and veggies while pregnant were less likely to turn… Read More >>

The sequester may be this week's most important news item, but automatic spending cuts and the Budget Control Act don't exactly make for juicy headlines. That is, of course, unless there's a (botched) Star Wars reference involved. Herein, the week in (genuine) wacky news: • Dennis Rodman visits North Korea, praises ruthless dictator: It's weird enough—almost too weird, really—that former NBA star Dennis Rodman landed in…earlier this… Read More >>

Due to sequestration, automatic cuts will start taking a chunk out of the federal budget starting today. In sympathy with the government’s plight, Reader’s Digest’s humor department will be indiscriminately slashing its jokes all day. A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken takes out a cigarette and begins to smoke. The egg rolls… Read More >>

A few months ago, as I watched  a video in a post by a colleague called "A Fascinating Look Inside a McDonald’s Photo Shoot" I remember thinking "Hey, all that food styling is pretty neat and I want one of those crème brulee things!" Of course, slick advertising is only part of the fast-food formula. This past weekend, I couldn't put down Michael Moss's New York Times Magazine piece on the processed food industry, "The…." As Moss… Read More >>

Mehmet Oz, MD, certainly spiced up the National Governor Association’s annual winter meeting this week with some pearls of health wisdom for the leaders personally and for their states. Among them: Get busy more often.“The average American is intimate once a week,” Oz said in his speech. “If you could go from once a week to twice a week—which is very achievable… Read More >>

File this one under, “and they decided to study this WHY?” In an almost-unbelievably titled new paper in the New Zealand Medical Journal—“Flatulence on Airplanes: Just Let It Go”—researchers revealed some pretty surprising findings about passing gas, particularly on airplanes. For instance, did you know that … … The average person passes… Read More >>