Every year, researchers crunch the data and map out where Americans are struggling most with weight – and the results aren’t random. The same states appear at the top of the list, year after year. Some of them are states you might expect. Others might surprise you. And when you look closely at the reasons...

Every so often, a food you already eat turns out to be the smartest choice on your plate. Not because of a new trend or an exotic ingredient, but because the numbers genuinely add up. Meat has been both celebrated and criticized for years, and that debate has made it harder to pick out what...

Something shifted in Washington this week that millions of Americans who take antidepressants will want to pay attention to. It didn’t come from a hospital, a medical journal, or a professional association. It came from the federal government, and it’s already dividing the psychiatric community in ways rarely seen in recent memory. The debate at...

There’s a version of the GLP-1 weight loss story that most patients hear, and then there’s the one orthopedic surgeons are quietly telling each other at conferences. Both are true. Neither one is complete without the other. Millions of Americans are now using semaglutide (sold as Ozempic and Wegovy) or tirzepatide (sold as Mounjaro and...

There are stories that make you stop mid-scroll and just sit for a moment. Rocky Dennis is one of them. Born in California in the early 1960s, he faced a medical reality so rare that most doctors had never encountered it, and a physical appearance so striking that strangers would sometimes cross the street to...

Every summer, tens of millions of Americans throw chicken on the grill without giving a second thought to how it got from the farm to the package in their fridge. The familiar smell of a roasting bird, the satisfying sizzle on a hot pan – it all feels completely routine. But somewhere between the farm...

There is a small organ sitting behind your breastbone, roughly the size of a walnut in adults, that most physicians have spent decades barely thinking about. Medical students learn that it matters intensely in childhood, training the immune system’s T cells, and then gradually fades into irrelevance as the body matures. By the time most...

There is a moment most of us recognize but rarely discuss: the slow shuffle of a parent crossing a parking lot, or the way an older friend hesitates before stepping off a curb. We tend to file it under “getting older” and move on. But a growing body of research is asking whether that ordinary...

Somewhere between buying organic, reading nutrition labels, and swapping chips for something that sounds virtuous, a sneaky pattern emerges. You’re eating foods that feel genuinely healthy. You track your steps, you skip dessert, you reach for the granola bar instead of the cookie. And yet the scale creeps in a direction you didn’t plan for....

Three people dead on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A rodent-borne virus spreading, perhaps, between human beings in close quarters. The World Health Organization is scrambling to contain a cluster of cases spanning multiple continents in a matter of days. For anyone who lived through the early, unnerving months of...

Many people reach for a bottle of herbal supplements the same way they’d reach for a glass of water. It feels like a small, harmless act. You’ve heard the names on podcasts, seen the bright labels at the pharmacy, and maybe even received a recommendation from a friend who swears by it. These are “natural”...

There are artists who go quiet when life gets hard, and there are artists who pick up a camera and talk straight to the people who love them. Dolly Parton, at 80 years old and in the middle of one of the most difficult stretches of her life, is firmly in the second category. On...