health

People who get food stamps have lower annual health care expenses than other low-income adults.

For decades, scientists have known that daylight is essential to human health. Back in 1948, the British Medical Journal poked fun at a group of engineers who tried to convince doctors that artificial light was superior to sunlight.

America in recent decades has seen increases to life expectancy, a proxy for quality health care. We gained, on average, 5.3 years between 1980 and 2014. But the uneven distribution of these gains may be influencing political affiliation.

Legislation like the Clean Water Act has helped check the effluent flowing into rivers and streams. Though that fight is far from over, a new, all-too-modern danger has meanwhile seeped invisibly into waters around the world: legal and illegal drugs. And their effect on the ecosystem is poorly understood.

Demand for sugar in the United States grew throughout the 20^th century. But it skyrocketed when the food industry began mass producing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the 1970s. Though HFCS intake has fallen in the new millennium, researchers still struggle to understand how this hotly debated sweetener impacts our health.

There are almost 1.3 million lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) high school students in the United States, according to the first nationwide survey measuring their numbers and attitudes toward risk. These students – about 8 percent of the total – are nearly five times more likely than their straight peers to have attempted suicide and more than four times more likely to have experimented with hard drugs like heroin and meth.