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’...

Who would say no to a fancy royal title? I don’t know about you, but Your Royal Highness or even milady sound pretty great to me. Well, as it turns out, some titles are more of a curse than a blessing. In fact, there’s one title in the British royal family’s lineage that may literally be cursed! We’re not just talking a little unlucky in love. We’re talking so bad that it’s effectively been banned from use. Yikes! Also, we’re totally intrigued, and we’re betting you are too. So which title comes with a whole lot of baggage, and what happened to the royals to whom it was given? And could it ever be brought back from (ahem) the dead? We asked royal historian Tracy Borman, author of The Private Lives of the Tudors: Uncovering the Secrets of Britain’s Greatest Dynasty , to shed some light on the title no modern royal would likely ever want. Get  Reader’s Digest ’s  Read Up newsletter for more royals, history, hu...

As a mom, I rarely have the luxury of grocery shopping by myself. Instead, I almost always have one or two kids doing laps around the shopping cart and asking me to open snacks I have yet to pay for—all while I’m feeling avocados to try to find some that are ripe enough to eat that night. So naturally, I sometimes forget to open the egg carton to check for cracked shells as I’m cruising down the dairy aisle . Which has led me to wonder: Do I really need to throw away eggs that are already cracked before I bring them home? And how about eggs that accidentally break on the way home? I mean, it’s not like I’m going to eat them raw—they’re going to get cooked. I would hate to throw them out if I didn’t have to, both because eggs are so darn expensive these days and because chucking a few would require me to head back to the grocery store sooner than I want to. That said, I also don’t want to accidentally poison my entire family. So what...

If you could turn a camera on yourself in a movie theater, what would you see? If you’re watching the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything , like I did last week, your face would probably be a mix of shock, bemusement, anger and overall slack-jawed incredulity at how we arrived at this moment in time. Like, what is even happening here? This strange movie about an equally strange character is mesmerizing, just like Holmes’s deep-welled, occasionally blinking blue eyes that have become a fixture over the last decade or so of her rise and fall. It’s a movie you can’t stop starting at, even as you want to avert your gaze, because it raises so many uncomfortable questions about our current moment, what we value and even reality itself. The A24 production, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, opened last weekend with a $15 million box-office haul, the biggest opener for a documentary since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 back in 2...