Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has some thoughts about Ozempic. According to the nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the government should not provide the drug for millions of Americans, but instead address obesity and diabetes by handing out organic food and gym memberships. Like many of RFK’s statements, these ideas have elicited some outrage. Their basic premise, though—that Americans should control their weight by eating better and getting exercise—could not be more mainstream. But this commonsense philosophy of losing weight, as espoused by RFK, the FDA, and really almost any doctor whom you might have asked…

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. Updated at 10:58 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 5, 2024 Two very ugly, uniquely American things happened yesterday: A health-care executive was shot dead, and because he was a health-care executive, people cheered. UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered yesterday outside his hotel in Midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. The identity of the killer is unknown. His motive is not yet clear. Yet despite the cold-blooded nature of the attack, and despite the many unknowns, people all over the country…

Across the country, the thirst for an illicit beverage is growing. Raw milk can’t be sold legally for human consumption in many states, but some 11 million Americans drink it anyway as wellness influencers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., extol its benefits. They do so despite a well-established risk of disease and death: E. coli, salmonella, and listeria have all been found in unpasteurized milk. This year, a new pathogen has been added to the list. Bird flu was first detected in American dairy cows in March, and in June, an FDA study found infectious viral particles in dozens of…

Updated at 11:23 a.m. on December 4, 2024 The second time I freaked out about bedbugs, my landlord suggested I might be overreacting, just a tad. My husband and I had fought back an infestation just five months earlier; now, after finding a single bedbug on my pillow—sated because, I presumed, it’d bitten me—I was demanding that the building respond. “You know they don’t cause disease,” the landlord told me. Common wisdom holds that bedbugs do not spread diseases to humans, just as my landlord said—or at least that the bugs are so widespread and bite humans so often that…