Health Tips Line

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...

Scanning documents and photos sometimes seems pretty old-school, like sending a fax. But it’s surprising how often you need a scanner. Maybe your bank needs a signature, you have to scan W-2s and pay stubs for a mortgage application or you need to scan and save receipts for your home business. I usually discover I need a scanner soon after I’ve congratulated myself for offloading that ugly old printer-scanner combo that was gathering dust in my spare bedroom. Depending on the document that needs scanning and how important I think the quality needs to be, I typically take a picture on my phone, then text or email it to the recipient, or go to FedEx or the UPS Store and have them do it. Well, color me shocked to learn that I have had a scanner on my phone this entire time! Like, a real scanner that actually scans—not takes a picture that I have to crop and try to fix the lighting and shadows and then pray that the recipient will take pity on my very substandard offerin...