A hilarious ad in my morning New York Times headlines e-mail made me laugh out loud even though I’m in a bit of an early-morning stupor at the moment. I don’t want to reproduce it here because of copyright issues, but here’s the setup: two hippos standing shoulder deep in water, with just their faces and their backs showing. One is walking toward the camera, with the second slightly behind. The caption reads, “Fred, stop standing so close. I might get fat.”
How could you not click on that? So of course I did.
And I found a funny blog post at …read more

New findings released by the NIH and published in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine characterize obesity as being “socially contagious.” Translation: The more fat friends you have, the more likely you are to become fat. The same is true for slim pals.
At first I thought, “Well, people tend to gather in like groups, so these must be faulty findings. But this quote in a press release from UC San Diego set me straight: “It’s not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with,” said Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, a …read more