Foods that supposedly have superior health benefits reach news headlines all the time. But categorizing foods as either good or bad—the way marketers do when they crown new "superfoods"—is not necessarily the best way to approach nutrition. In truth, any whole (AKA unprocessed) food you eat is going to be nutritious, and claiming that some are superior to others is simply marketing.

“Produce is super. It doesn’t really matter what you are picking in the produce aisle. It is going to be super,” says Leslie Bonci, a registered dietician and sports nutritionist. Or if not super, she adds, at least “superb.”

That's not far from the truth. To date, no studies suggest that coconut oil provides any superior benefit compared to other foods, especially other oils. Nevertheless, for the past decade, it has been touted as a "healthy fat"—compared to others—that should be eaten and used in cooking often. Coconut oil had its first big downfall a year ago when the American Heart Association published a report warning about the dangers of eating too many unhealthy, saturated fats. The report included coconut oil on a list of the most unhealthy fats, taking many health-conscious Americans by surprise.

A mother's depression and anxiety from conception through the first year of the baby's life is associated with negative developmental outcomes through adolescence, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

That could affect a lot of women: About 15% to 23% of women worldwide experience anxiety during pregnancy, while 15% deal with anxiety after childbirth. Depression through pregnancy is estimated to affect 10% of women, and 15% face postpartum depression. The burden is greater for women who are experiencing poverty or are teen parents, according to Postpartum Support International.

For the baby, the perinatal stage — which is defined as the time from conception through pregnancy (antenatal), birth and the first year of the baby's life (postnatal) — is "a time of unprecedented growth and sensitivity," the study said. That's when exposures and early life experiences may modify development starting from when he or she is in the womb to that critical first year as a growing child and onward.

A mother experiencing depression and anxiety before and after birth was moderately linked with her child's deficits in language and cognitive and motor development in infancy.

America is drinking a lot more whole milk these days. Whole milk brands have had a 13% growth in sales in the first seven months of 2020 over the same period a year ago, according to the National Dairy Council. Since dairy milk consumption in general has been down year after year, an increase of a whopping 13% is rather monumental. But before you start worrying about the impact of all this whole milk to our national girth, you should know about some of the surprising benefits of whole milk.

The disruption to schools caused by the coronavirus pandemic constitutes a “global education emergency” that threatens to derail the education of at least 24 million students projected to drop out of school as a result, said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“At the height of Covid-19,” 192 countries shuttered schools, leaving 1.6 billion students without in-person learning, Fore said on a press call hosted by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She added that now, more than 870 million students, “or half the world’s student population in 51 countries,” are still unable to return to school.

“The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return,” she said. “That’s why we are urging governments to prioritize reopening schools when restrictions are lifted.”

She added that beyond education, schools around the world provide many students with a source of nutrition and immunizations.

“At least 24 million children are projected to drop out of school due to Covid-19,” she said.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

Dear How to Do It,

I am a pansexual woman with multiple partners (one woman and a few men) with a relatively straightforward question. I have been poly for about a year, and it was been WONDERFUL for my sex drive and enjoyment, I have learned a lot about my body, and I am having more sex than I ever have. The issue, with all of that sex, is how sore I have been getting. Sex does not hurt me in isolation, but after three or four straight days in which I am having penetrative sex, I need two or so days off to recover, which doesn’t really work with my poly schedule or my heightened sex drive. I know I am having a lot of sex, but considering I have been using lube and none of my partners are too rough with me (though some of the men are rather well-endowed), I am surprised at the lasting soreness. Do you have any advice so I can keep going at my current rate without any breaks?

—Run Ragged

Restaurants are trying to keep customers safe from COVID-19 – by wearing masks, serving outdoors and disinfecting from top to bottom – but a new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests it might not be enough.

Adults with confirmed COVID-19 are twice as likely to have dined out at a restaurant in the 14 days before becoming sick than those who tested negative, according to the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report issued Thursday.

Positive patients were also more likely to report going to a bar or coffee shop when the analysis was limited to those without close contact to people with known coronavirus.

For the first time since 2000, the official guidance on relationships and sex education (RSE) in England is changing. From this month, RSE is mandatory in every secondary school, regardless of whether they are state or private (though the Government has said it will make allowances for schools as yet unable to implement the change because of the coronavirus crisis).

Relationships education – which is now compulsory in every primary school – will mainly deal with families and friendships. It will cover the risks of online relationships, digital privacy, physical boundaries and recognising abusive behaviour.

But will the new guidance protect and empower young people for sex and relationships in a modern world?“The curriculum puts the physical health and emotional wellbeing of young people at its core,” Chiquita Henson, headteacher of Cirencester Deer Park School, a secondary school in Gloucestershire, tells i.

One month into the forced reopening of Florida's schools, dozens of classrooms — along with some entire schools — have been temporarily shuttered because of coronavirus outbreaks, and infections among school-age children have jumped 34 percent. But parents in many parts of the state don't know if outbreaks of the virus are related to their own schools because the state ordered some counties to keep health data secret.

A Popeyes employee has been fired after a cop in Texas claimed his food had been tampered with.

According to the San Antonio Police Department Officer A. Martinez said he heard the fast food restaurant worker making derogatory remarks about members of law enforcement while getting his meal of chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy at the drive-thru.

The cop claims that he had already begun to eat the meal then saw 'ACAB' – an abbreviation for 'all cop are b*****ds' - written inside in black marker and noticed what looked like saliva on his food.

Marijuana use is on the rise among baby boomers in the United States, especially men, according to a study published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The findings appear to reflect changing attitudes toward cannabis across the country, study co-author Bill Jesdale, an assistant professor of population and quantitative health science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worchester, suggested.

Use of the drug increased in older adults in both the states where marijuana has been legalized for recreational use and in the states where it has not, he said. “It seems that something has happened to the country as a whole.”

A variety of new studies show that flying might be relatively safe during the novel coronavirus pandemic, but this hinges on one key element: Everyone aboard the airplane has to observe safety regulations. That includes social distancing where possible and wearing masks at all times during the flight.

But the best research of airplane COVID-19 transmission came from a Korean study that should make you rethink flying in the near future. The study showed that an asymptomatic transmission was possible aboard a flight where everyone was pre-screened for symptoms and were given N95 respirators. Even so, a passenger got the virus from one of the asymptomatics on board, likely after sharing the same bathroom. If that’s possible inside a controlled flight, then one can only imagine what happens aboard a plane populated by “covidiots” and “an inept crew who couldn’t care less.”

That’s how a passenger from a returning Tui flight from Greece described the experience to BBC News. The flight from Zante, Greece, to Cardiff, Wales had nearly 200 people on board, and everyone has been instructed to self-isolate for two weeks after 16 people tested positive for COVID-19.

The guests arrived at the Lucerne Hotel, two blocks from Central Park, carrying their belongings, stepping off buses and filling the hotel’s empty rooms, which typically cost more than $200 a night.

They were not tourists nor business travelers but residents of homeless shelters whom the city sent to the Lucerne to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the crowded shelter system. Over three days, 283 men moved into the hotel.

Their arrival has become a flash point and a test of values for the Upper West Side — a neighborhood with a reputation as one of the most liberal enclaves in New York and in the entire country.

One day after the men began moving into the Lucerne, on West 79th Street, a private Facebook group — Upper West Siders for Safer Streets — was created by residents who were up in arms. The group has more than 8,700 members.

Many commenters said the men menaced pedestrians, urinated and defecated on the street and used and sold drugs in the open.

In interviews, some longtime residents said the hotel’s conversion into a shelter had dimmed the quality of life and evoked memories of an era when the neighborhood was filled with single room occupancy hotels that helped fuel crime.

First onions, now shrimp: Making ceviche this summer is turning out to be a total nightmare. (Along with everything else.) The FDA has announced a major recall of frozen shrimp sold to large grocery chains including Costco and Kirkland. The questionable crustaceans are said to be potentially infected with salmonella—an organism that can cause fever, nausea, upset stomach, and even fatality in some rare cases.

The recall went into effect last Wednesday and includes various sizes of frozen cooked, peeled, and deveined shrimp sold in 1-, 1.5-, and 2-pound retail bags that originated from Kader Exports. The shrimp is said to have been distributed starting in late February through the middle of May and then sold by major grocery chains nationwide. A full list of the recalled products containing Kader Exports frozen shrimp can be found here.

The recalled hand sanitizer list from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is growing. In June, the FDA warned consumers against using hand sanitizer that contains the toxic ingredient methanol. Now the agency says there’s another toxin showing up in hand sanitizers that is causing concern.

It’s called 1-propanol, and the FDA on Wednesday said in a new warning that the ingredient can be “toxic and life-threatening when ingested.” The biggest concern, the FDA says, is with young children accidentally ingesting the toxin or adults or teens who drink it as an alcohol substitute.