Science struggles to grasp your love handles
You think you know what’s fat, don’t you? It’s defined by pounds, or body-mass index, or how much roly-poly flesh you can pinch between your thumb and forefinger. (Try this only on yourself.) You know fat when you see it. And you can measure it, objectively. Right? And way too many people are way too...
Here’s to unlimited new years
The time between the holidays is odd. You wake up the day after Christmas and it’s all over except the returns. There’s a morning-after sadness, the hangover that follows a binge on sentimentality and anxiety and, yes, genuine good cheer toward men. You’ve kissed all the cheeks and patted the backs and now we all...
Go fight cancer tomorrow night
The past year has brought hope that the thing that kills you won’t be cancer. Your demise might come from something even more hideous and protracted, but there’s a better chance that it won’t be cancer. More important to everyone but you, kids are getting more cancer-fighting tools. As the New York Times reported earlier...
Nature shower with a friend in 2013
Here’s a New Year’s resolution you’ll want to follow through on: take more nature showers, ideally with a friend. Or friends. As is usually the case with good ideas, there’s nothing new about this except the way we talk about it. “Taking a nature shower” is just another way of saying you should walk in...
Merry Christmas: Four more years, half of them pretty good
The Lancet just published a report—actually, a series of seven papers—known as the Global Burden of Disease. It’s a kraken, a beast, a megillah of data, with contributions from experts in more than 300 institutions in 50 countries. The good news: you’re living longer. The bad news: only about half of those new years will...
What does “Age Against the Machine” mean?
CNN is running a collection of articles about Baby Boomers. They are calling it “Boomers: Age Against the Machine.” We assume it’s a play on the name of the rap metal band Rage Against the Machine, a group that formed in the early 1990s, which is long after most Boomers stopped paying attention to new...
Olds and altitude sickness. And Viagra.
Ski season is here and with it the risk of altitude sickness. You know the drill: you start in Chicago (elevation 579 feet) or New York (which averages around 30 feet of elevation when it isn’t swamped by a hurricane). You fly a few hours west, rent a car, drive to Summit County and a...
Love your car? Get a bike.
If you love your car, you need to ride a bike. I have a slightly complicated rationale for this position, so you to have to pay slightly more attention than usual for a Recreati story. It begins with Superstorm Sandy and our human need to know the cause of horrible things. If we have...
Don’t jog in Beijing. Or bike. Or breathe deep.
For some time, people have noticed Bakersfield, California. Not as “the birthplace of the country music genre known worldwide as the Bakersfield Sound” or because it has more Basque restaurants than any other town in the country. Bakersfield gets a lot of unwanted attention because it is the most polluted city in the United States....
No one knows why you can’t stay up to watch the news
As people age, their sleep patterns change. This is not a revelation for you. Once, you could stay up till 2 a.m., sleep 12 hours, then do it over again. And feel great doing it. Now you go to bed at 10 p.m., turn turn turn, knuckle the pillow, wonder if the iPad will wake...
How much T is enough?
This is a story about sex, drugs and sports—things we love to talk about. And, for extra spice, porn and cancer. Pharmaceutical companies are aggressively marketing drugs to combat low testosterone—“low T’ in the ads—in older men, and they are doing it with the same enthusiasm (and big budgets) that they market rejuvenating creams and...
Fitness can compress your inevitable debility. Yay.
If you turned 65 in the middle of the last century—in 1950—you could expect 13.1 years more of life if you were a man and 16.2 years if you were a woman. If you turned 65 in 2007, your remaining life expectancy was 17.2 (male) and 19.9 (female) years. So, in theory, that’s about four...
