Grocery stores, considered essential businesses under stay-at-home orders, continue to operate during the coronavirus pandemic. Many people are making weekly trips to stores like Publix to stock up on meat, milk, bread, and other essentials -- provided they can find them. Unfortunately, some of the grocery stores have experienced jarring incidents of contamination. I'm not talking about people contracting the coronavirus, but contaminating produce and other items by licking or coughing on them! I kid you not.  Really, what the heck has gotten into people? Take Jennifer Walker, who was arrested at a California grocery store close to the Nevada border after licking $1,800 worth of merchandise. She placed several pieces of jewelry from the store on her hands and licked them, before loading her shopping cart containing other store items. The store deemed all of the items in her cart unsellable because of cross-contamination. Last month, an unnamed woman was arrested and...

Life is hard. When things aren't exactly going our way, we have a tendency to harp on the negative. Unfortunately, this makes us lose sight of the fact that there are positive aspects to these very things we complain about. Take your job, for example. Chances are there are things you might dislike -- if not dread about it -- from your obnoxious boss to your paltry benefits. At the end of the day, though, it still helps you put food on the table and a roof over your head. It might be the ideal job, but it certainly beats being unemployed. Plus, you can always look at it as a stepping stone toward something better. As far as relationships, we it's normal to have gripes about our partners. They're lazy. They don't take care of themselves. They don't do the little things anymore. They fritter away their money. But for every negative quality, we're bound to come up with a positive one. Perhaps he or she is a good parent, an attentive friend, or a charitable s...

Tis the season to be jolly! Here are a few fun facts regarding the holiday season in the U.S. that you may not know: 1. Nine in 10 Americans say they celebrate Christmas while 32% view it as more of a cultural holiday than a religious one. 2. USPS will deliver 16 billion holiday letters, packages, and cards. 3. Over 100 million Americans will travel for the holidays this year. 4. 86% of Americans say they buy holiday gifts for family or friends. 5. Americans aim to spend an average of $935.58 each during the holiday shopping season this year. 6. Total holiday sales are expected to be over $655 billion. 7. 85% of Americans say they will probably give someone candy as a gift. 8. Americans eat about 3,000 calories worth of food during a typical holiday dinner. 9. 22 million turkeys are eaten for Christmas. 10. Americans bought nearly 26 million real Christmas trees last year and more than 13 billion fake ones. The facts I found most surprising were #7 and #8 abov...

Can you guess where people buy most of their junk food? Chances are that fast-food restaurants like McDonald's and Burger King come to mind. A new study described in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition , however, reveals that U.S. adults buy the bulk of their empty-calorie foods and sugar-sweetened beverages at grocery stores and supermarkets. The new findings challenge the "food desert" hypothesis, which states that a lack of access to supermarkets and grocery stores in some underserved communities worsens the obesity crisis by restricting people's access to healthy foods. In other words, contrary to popular belief, access to healthy foods in a supermarket does not hinder Americans' consumption of empty calories. The study looked at data from 4,204 adults who reported their daily food intake in two nonconsecutive 24-hour periods in 2011 and 2012. The analysis determined that nearly half (46.3 percent) of U.S. adults consume sugar-sweetened b...

Ironic that I would create a post about this on Thanksgiving of all days, isn't it? But I find it a germane topic in light of the fact that many of us won't be happy when we step on the scale tomorrow morning. In fact, studies show that many people decide to go on diets the day after Thanksgiving as a way of mitigating the damage. Whether they keep the diet when Christmas and New Year's come rolling around is a different story. Here's my trick to losing weight: The best way to exercise self-control is to ask yourself how many calories eating that scrumptious slice of pizza would set you back. The key is to mull this over before you even put the food on your plate. If you do it the other way around, you'll feel as though you've committed to eating it ("it's on my plate already -- might as well eat it) and will feel bad putting the slice back in the box. Now, that doesn't mean you can never "cheat" once in a while. After all, experts...

...you were told that you had to rid yourself of all your possessions (excluding food, drink, water, medicine, clothing, and other essentials) -- except for only one . Which one item would you keep? Remember, we're talking about things that would be considered non-essentials -- wants rather than needs. You could only stay with one. I'll break the ice. As hard as it would be to kiss my beloved books goodbye, I think I would choose either my cell phone or laptop. Keeping one not only ensures I have the means to contact others, but I can use either the phone or laptop to avail of free Wi-Fi at a nearby Starbucks or McDonald's. Such gadgets also offer great entertainment value in the sense you can use them to play games and listen to music. As if that weren't enough, they have more practical applications, e.g., you can create Word documents on them. I realize there's no easy answer here. For example, men would have to forego things like porn and condoms; wom...

I watch Jeopardy! every night -- it is hands down one of my favorite shows. I couldn't help but notice that men tend to dominate when it comes to certain categories, including: History Political science Geography Science Math On the other hand, women fare a lot better at subjects like food, poetry, writing, language, and entertainment. I've heard for years now that there's a major shortage in women embarking on careers in such sciences as engineering. It seems hard to believe, as I found many of the brightest students in my math and science classes to be female. It seems more women like gravitating toward the soft/people sciences (psychology, sociology, and so on) than the natural variety (chemistry, biology, etc.). Well, I'm living proof (as you can see by this blog) that men, too, can be passionate about the softer, people-driven sciences. I've always been math- and science-averse, a stark contrast to my wife, who's a science teacher an...