You probably remember when you took your last shower, but if I ask you to examine your routine more closely, you might discover some blank spots. Which hand do you use to pick up the shampoo bottle? Which armpit do you soap up first? Bathing, brushing your teeth, driving to work, making coffee—these are all core habits. In 1890, the psychologist William James observed that living creatures are nothing if not “bundles of habits.” Habits, according to James’s worldview, are a bargain with the devil. They make life easier by automating behaviors you perform regularly. (I would rather attend to…

In the summer of 2018, 59-year-old David Gould went for his annual checkup, expecting to hear the usual: Everything looks fine. Instead, he was told that he was newly—and oddly—anemic. Two months later, Gould began to experience a strange cascade of symptoms. His ankles swelled to the width of his calves. The right side of his face became so bloated that he could not open his eye. He developed a full-body rash, joint pain, fever, and drenching night sweats. His anemia worsened, and he was requiring frequent blood transfusions. Gould’s physicians were baffled; he was scared. “I started to get…

For centuries, eggnog has been a part of America’s Christmas festivities. George Washington was rumored to have his own recipe, and the concoction was the catalyst of a riot at West Point in the wee hours of Christmas morning 1826. Today, the grocery chain Kroger sells nearly 3 million gallons of the drink each year. But for a drink with so much tradition, eggnog has long divided Christmas tables. When BuzzFeed ran an article in 2016 titled “Eggnog Is Delicious and If You Disagree You’re Wrong,” it was paired with a missive the same day calling the drink “Absolute Garbage.”…

At about midnight each weekday, a group of five men and women arrives at the darkened restaurant doors of Sobre Masa in Brooklyn and performs a sacred art of transformation. Heirloom corn—hundreds of pounds in shades of blue, yellow, red—is boiled and steeped for hours in an alkaline solution, a process called nixtamalization. Then it’s rinsed, milled, aerated, and finally passed through a machine that cuts the resulting masa dough into perfect tortillas and griddles them. By 8 a.m. or so, the workers will have made about 1,000 pounds of masa and many hundreds of tortillas, which smell like popcorn…

The twinkling of lit-up trees and festive displays in store windows have come to mean two things: The holidays are upon us, and so is COVID. Since the pandemic began, the week between Christmas and New Year’s has coincided with the dreaded “winter wave.” During that dark period, cases have reliably surged after rising throughout the fall. The holiday season in 2020 and 2021 marked the two biggest COVID peaks to date, with major spikes in infections that also led to hospitalizations and deaths. But something weird is happening this year. From September through November, levels of the virus in…

Yesterday, America had one of its worst days of bird flu to date. For starters, the CDC confirmed the country’s first severe case of human bird-flu infection. The patient, a Louisiana resident who is over the age of 65 and has underlying medical conditions, is in the hospital with severe respiratory illness and is in critical condition. This is the first time transmission has been traced back to exposure to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks. Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency after weeks of rising infections among dairy herds and people. In Los Angeles,…

One dreary November Monday as I was enjoying a morning cup of tea, my phone alerted me that my cat, Avalanche, was exercising less than usual. For the past six weeks, Avalanche has worn a sleek black-and-gold collar that tracks her every move—when and how often she sleeps, runs, walks, eats, drinks, and even grooms. This notification told me that her energy was lower than typical, so I should keep an eye on her food and water intake. As a veteran hypochondriac, I wondered for a second whether this might be the first sign of some horrible and serious condition.…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s personal health-care routine is perplexing in its inconsistencies. He decries seed oils, despite near scientific consensus that they’re harmless; drinks raw milk, which has been proved to get people sick; and takes testosterone as part of his anti-aging routine while insisting he’s not on anabolic steroids. Some of his routines, such as downing raw milk for its purported health benefits, are based on bunk science. But his anti-aging protocol seems to be serving him well, even if its most obvious effects look a lot like juicing. While many men in their 70s are focused on staving…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. A few years ago, West Virginia, which has the highest obesity rate in the nation, quietly began a small and unusual pilot program that would touch hundreds of lives: It started covering obesity drugs for state employees—even as many other insurers balked at what they considered expensive “vanity” drugs. The program was, by health measures, a success. Patients shed as much as 120 pounds, their cholesterol dropped, their prediabetes faded, and they cut down on blood-pressure meds. As word began to spread, more…

In 1829, the Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham invented a cracker made from coarse wheat that he believed would help restore American health. He lamented the “miserable trash” that made up the average diet, especially white bread, and thought his eponymous crackers would curtail masturbation, which he deemed deleterious to both moral and physical well-being. (As someone who condemned sweet treats, he would have seen the s’more as an abomination.) Graham was, in many ways, what we might today call a wellness influencer. Nineteenth-century Americans opened Grahamite boarding houses so that travelers could eat his chaste and bland foods, and catch…