Open Streets ICT is coming. Are you ready?

Are diets just placebos?

Is your hair dye increasing your risk of breast cancer?

Hair products, conveniently, seem to never get the wrath that other "artificial" lifestyle products (artificial sweeteners, preservatives, herbicides) get. Does this study change that? I doubt it.

Have you seen the Sedgwick County CHIP?

That's Community Health Improvement Plan, which is even more delicious than what you were thinking of...

Sleeping poorly may make junk food seem a lot more appealing.

The data is still maturing on this topic, but it's starting to look pretty obvious that we should all sleep more, for reasons obvious and not-so-obvious. I can speak from experience. During my internship, one of the hospitals I covered had a cafeteria that was free--in unlimited quantities--to trainees. I fell into a nasty habit of 3 am cheesecake binges during my in-house nights on call. It was ugly...

This paper deserves to be mentioned much higher in the list, but I may have more to say about it later. So...for the one-thousanth time, we have evidence that dietary choices can prolong or shorten your life.

Using one of three diet indices, investigators publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "[a] 20-percentile increase in diet scores (indicating an improved quality of diet) was significantly associated with a reduction in total mortality of 8 to 17%." For the sake of comparison, taking a statin medication for cholesterol in high-risk people is associated with about a fourteen percent reduction in mortality. And to stave off the angry emails, I know that the statin data comes from high-quality randomized trials, while the referenced dietary study is observational. But still.