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  Mental Health and Mental Illness: How to Spot Problems and Get Help Mental health affects nearly everything we do—how we think, feel, make decisions, respond to stress, and connect with other people. It is more than the absence of a psychiatric diagnosis. A person with a diagnosed mental illness may feel stable and well for long periods. Meanwhile, someone without a diagnosis may be struggling with serious emotional distress. Mental health exists on a spectrum, and it can shift throughout a person’s life. Mental illness refers to conditions that cause clinically significant changes in mood, thought, perception, or behavior. These conditions include anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance-use disorders. There is no single way mental illness looks. Symptoms may appear once, return periodically, or continue for years. Two people with the same diagnosis can ...
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  8  Food Additives Linked to High Blood Pressure and Heart Disease The preservatives that keep food fresh, colorful, and shelf-stable may come with a hidden cost. A large study of more than 112,000 people found that heavy consumption of several widely used preservatives was associated with higher rates of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Researchers identified eight additives linked to hypertension, with one also associated with cardiovascular disease. The study was observational, so it can’t prove that these preservatives directly caused the health problems. Still, the findings raise questions about ingredients found throughout the processed food supply. Why Researchers Studied Preservatives Preservatives do a lot of useful work. They prevent bacteria and mold from growing, slow spoilage, and help foods maintain their color, flavor, and freshness. That’s why they appear in hundreds of thousands of industrially processed products. Their widespread use also mean...
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  Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports: The Search for a Fair and Workable Policy Few issues in sports produce more heat—or less productive conversation—than the participation of transgender women in female competition. That’s partly because the debate touches several sensitive questions at once. What makes competition fair? When does a physical advantage become too significant? How should sports balance gender identity with sex-linked athletic differences? And when an event involves tackling, striking, or collision, how much uncertainty about safety is acceptable? The language matters, too. Transgender women are people whose gender identity is female and whose sex was recorded as male at birth. Describing the issue only as “biological males competing against women” highlights concern about sex-linked performance differences, but it can also dismiss the identity and dignity of transgender athletes. A serious discussion has to hold two ideas at once: transgender athletes deserve r...
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  ULTRA ENDURANCE AND THE ULTRA-FIT: THE RISKS AND REWARDS Exercise is one of the best-supported ways to improve health and extend life. It lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, several cancers, and premature death. That fact is not in dispute. Less certain is whether the benefits keep increasing when exercise becomes extreme: ultramarathons, Ironman-distance triathlons, multi-day cycling races, and years of high-volume endurance training. The popular claim that ultra-fit athletes “often die young” is not supported by the strongest available evidence. In fact, elite endurance athletes generally live longer than the wider population. Former Tour de France competitors have shown substantially lower mortality, while research following Olympic athletes has found gains in life expectancy, including fewer years of life lost to cardiovascular disease and cancer ( Parry-Williams and Sharma, 2020 ; Antero-Jacquemin et al., 2018 ). That does not mean extreme exercise is harmle...
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  The Minnesota Effect: What Starvation Science Teaches Us About Dieting and Human Behavior In 1944, 36 healthy young men volunteered to go hungry. They were conscientious objectors to military service during World War II, and they wanted to contribute to the relief effort in another way. Across Europe, millions of people were starving. Scientists knew that food could keep famine victims alive, but they knew much less about how to rehabilitate a person after prolonged deprivation. Physiologist Ancel Keys and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota designed an experiment to find out. The volunteers would first eat normally under controlled conditions. Then, for six months, researchers would cut their food intake until they had lost roughly a quarter of their body weight. A rehabilitation period would follow. The experiment became one of the most important studies of human starvation ever conducted. Its findings were eventually published in the two-volume Biology of Human ...
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