Health Tips Line

“It feels like no one really knows what we’re doing by taking peptides,” says Margo ­Fleming, a 41-year-old ultramarathon runner in Los Angeles. Fleming started using BPC-157, a synthetic peptide that allegedly boosts wound healing and supports recovery, two years ago after hearing recommendations from several health professionals, including a personal trainer, a massage therapist and a naturopath. “I’ve dealt with a lot of injuries in the past, but I feel like my body is more resilient on peptides,” she says. Fleming says some of her chronic injuries—Achilles tendinitis and frequent calf strains—are gone. Peptides are the body’s messengers that signal your cells to execute functions like prompting your kidneys to absorb water or your brain to release oxytocin . They occur naturally in your body, but synthetic versions, like the ones Fleming uses, can also be made in a laboratory and injected or swallowed to induce a variety of v...

Suffering from punctuation paralysis? Semicolon confusion? End-of-sentence prepositions rage? Relax! The grammar guru, aka Ellen Jovin, will see you now. Or maybe she saw you already. Jovin has set up her Grammar Table in all 50 states, taking on every question posed by passersby, from the basic they’re vs. their to the eternally vexing lay vs. lie . And what she’s learned in her travels is this: Grammar is everywhere . We can’t escape it, even though many of us try. But love it, as Jovin does? “I think it’s completely thrilling to be able to look at a sentence and know how many clauses and prepositional phrases there are, whether the verbs are transitive or intransitive, what the pronoun case is and so on,” she says. “I would have been ecstatic if we had spent additional years on grammar in school.” In September 2018, Jovin, then an author, lecturer and communications coach for Syntaxis—her business that focuses on teaching commu...

The holidays are coming, which means family gatherings and at least one relative telling a story you’ve heard a hundred times. (You know the one.) But between the food and festivities, there’s an opportunity most of us overlook: learning more about our family history. After all, when else do you have so many people who know so much about your past gathered in one place? And we’re not just talking about digging up old family secrets (though those can be pretty juicy). Your relatives are living connections to people, places and stories you may never get another chance to hear about. The trick is knowing what family history questions to ask. To help you get those conversations started, we tapped two experts from American Ancestors: David Allen Lambert, the company’s chief genealogist, and Sarah Quiat, the interim director for the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center. They shared the questions worth asking your relatives while you have the chance, whether you’...