Health Tips Line

Cooks have long loved the distinctive whoosh of firing up a gas stove. The flames pop up quickly and provide consistent heat, making it easy to cook with pinpoint control. Gas stoves also save the day if you need to cook when the power’s out because they don’t require electricity (for the cooking part, anyway). As a cook and an electrician, I wouldn’t give up mine for anything. Unfortunately, gas stoves hide lurking dangers behind that satisfying flame. One major problem is air quality. We’ll dig into the specifics below, but in a recent study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health , researchers found that nearly 13% of childhood asthma in the United States is caused directly by gas stoves. And that’s just one of the findings. Even a perfectly functioning gas stove gives off invisible fumes. But keeping your eyes peeled for odd flame colors can help you diagnose major safety risks before they get out of hand. ...

At the risk of sounding old, it’s hard to keep up with what kids are doing online these days. Even uttering that sentence puts me firmly in the relic category, but … 6-7 ? Come on now! What are we even doing here? The latest viral meme, involving a Dr. Seuss character who is definitely not teaching the youth their ABCs, seems silly and ridiculous at first glance—but is actually pretty terrifying. Sharing the meme has also had some very real, very scary consequences that you and your kids should be aware of. I’ve been on the internet since the mid-1990s, so I have some big Gen X energy around online trends. My biggest fear was getting caught illegally downloading a few songs from Napster. (Which I barely did! I love copyright law!) But when I got a look at this creepy new meme, it had me wishing for the good old days. To find out about this internet trend that’s increasingly getting the police called and has even led to some teen arrests, I spoke with Lt....

Labor Day weekend is over, and summer is in the rearview mirror for another year. You know what that means: school . And as you rush your kids out the door to the bus or carpool, it’s likely with a bowl of cereal in their bellies. My mom didn’t let us have “sugar cereals,” as she called them, so whenever I got the chance (at a friend’s house, usually), I’d devour Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch like I’d been starving in the desert for weeks. Then it was back to Cheerios—though I’ve moved on to cereals with even less sugar these days. Getting old is fun! As cereal season gets underway for another year, we thought it would be fun to take a look at which cereals are the most popular around the country. And lucky for us, CSP Global, which offers accredited nursing programs in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Portland, Oregon, had already done the heavy lifting. Ahead, I’ll take you state by state through their delicious survey results fi...

It’s been 35 years since I was in high school. And yet, multiple nights a year, I find myself roaming those halls once again. The details shift slightly each time, but the gist is always the same: I walk into school only to discover that I have a final exam coming up in English (sometimes it’s history)—a class I had no idea I was enrolled in and therefore haven’t shown up to once the entire year. How am I going to pull this off? Will the teacher realize she hasn’t seen me all year and fail me automatically? I don’t even know where the classroom is! The panic is so overwhelmingly real, and I start reprimanding myself for having been so irresponsible and for putting myself in what feels like an impossible situation. And then, just like that, I wake up. I’m so relieved … but also so rattled. Granted, I wasn’t the best student, and I cut my fair share of classes back in the day, but I was never that clueless. Why does my subconscious ...

I’ll never forget the gut punch of scrolling through Instagram one night before bed (just because I’m a health writer doesn’t mean I always have the healthiest habits) and seeing it: a picture of my entire group of close girl friends out to dinner, toasting to celebrate a birthday. Everyone was in the picture … except me . It was such a shock that I, a woman well into adulthood, burst into tears so loud that my husband came running in from the next room. As I wept, I frantically scrolled back through texts to see if I’d somehow missed an invite. Did I mute the group text by accident? Did my email send it to spam? Were hackers or aliens involved?  Nope. I just wasn’t invited.  The next day, when I saw one of the women, I gingerly asked how the party was. She looked at me sharply and sighed, “I knew that was going to hurt your feelings, but you need to get over it. Not everyone can be invited to everything.”  That hurt so...