What if preventing pain was like preventing cavities? Most of us learned dental hygiene from a very early age: Brush your teeth twice a day and don't forget to floss. We do it without thinking. Physical therapist Vinh Pham applies the same logic to preventing chronic pain in his new book: Sit Up Straight: Futureproof Your Body Against Chronic Pain with 12 Simple Movements.
Practicing these movements consistently, he says, can extend your range of motion and increase your flexibility. And it's no surprise that research has found this kind of exercise can help decrease chronic pain over time.
The typical American diet is loaded with empty calories from all that sugary, fatty (and addictive) junk food many of us eat. And it's also, sadly, linked to the chronic diseases that are killing us.
After decades of hand-wringing over this problem without much progress, there's new momentum to make policy changes to help. A group of food policy and nutrition experts are meeting at the White House later this month to come up with some concrete ways to shake up our eating habits and hopefully, load up our plates with more healthy fruits and veggies.
"We're all expressing our sexuality all the time," my eleventh grade health teacher said on the first day of class. For me, it was a revelation. Sexuality wasn't something to be hidden away or be ashamed of, it was an intrinsic part of who we were as adolescents and who we would become as adults.
Sex ed at my suburban New Jersey high school in the early 2000s was sex-positive. No question was off limits, and we even watched the (in)famous Seinfeld episode, The Contest.But our education was completely heterosexual, and never ventured outside the traditional gender binary.
Today, there is still no national mandate for sex education in the U.S., and even in the states that do provide courses, LGBTQ issues are often disregarded or vilified. With the school year starting up, NPR's Life Kit spoke with sexuality educators to understand how sex education could evolve to be supportive of queer students.
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