A couple weeks ago, I visited my dentist for a routine cleaning, and he recommended I replace my original silver-colored amalgam fillings with more contemporary tooth-colored ones. I admit, I was almost persuaded (but eventually decided that spending a few hundred bucks so people would stop noticing...
Some warning labels address activities that could pose a true danger to our health, like the grim images on cigarette packs. Others are more questionable, like the Parental Advisory Label program that used to indicate which CDs had explicit language (back in the days when we bought...
Despite what Hollywood wants you to believe, the American expectation that teeth should be a lustrous white is — quite literally — inhuman. Our chompers are naturally more of a cream color, and only cosmetic treatments can make them a gleaming white. Regardless, our preference for oral...
In 1939, Julius Fromm, the man who built a condom empire in post-WWI Germany, fled to London in fear for his life. Seeing the writing on the wall for Jews in Germany, Fromm knew he’d be no exception, especially since he was a prominent liberal Jew who...
I already ranked herbs, so now I’ve decided to take a look at their remarkably pungent kitchen cupboard brethren: Spices. I know, herbs and spices are often intermingled on the spice rack, so they might seem one in the same, but they are indeed different — herbs are...
Someone, somewhere needs donor blood roughly every two seconds in the U.S., according to the American Red Cross. Unfortunately, summer is a rough patch for blood banks from coast to coast, as the number of donations fall when regular donors go on vacation and schools close. “Giving blood...
A few years back, the internet pointed and laughed when a young baseball fan got a brain freeze after slamming a slushee. And while we’re far too mature to laugh at such a thing (okay, we laughed too — sorry, kid), we did aim to find the...
In the U.S., on average, 20 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant. On the face of it, this makes no sense: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 2,813,503 registered deaths in the country in 2017: That’s nearly 8,000 per day....
When it comes to working out, we’re not all strongmen like Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (aka The Mountain). In fact, many of us could go our entire lives and still have no clue how a lat pull-down differs from an incline bench. Which is to say, there’s no shame in not...
There are a lot of different ways to contract the dreaded runs — there’s bacterial infections, allergic reactions and spicy potato chips, just to name a few. But all forms of the runs are not equal. While many can be pretty easily tamed by over-the-counter antidiarrheals, some...
Sure, we all know sugar is bad. But what about the other options, like artificial sugar or possibly even a glob of honey? Can I add those to my morning coffee without suffering from the many debilitating ailments associated with sugar? To find out, I asked nutritionist David...
All scars tell a story. Some of these stories are extraordinary, while others are of the “I fell out of my chair and busted open my chin on the table” variety, but each ends with our skin modified, our injured bodies forever altered. While most underlying scar...
