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When I have a little time, I like to scroll through the top news stories at CNN.com.  Now I wish I hadn't. AARP did a study of the eight things you should never touch, and lemon wedges were right up there at the top of the list.   The article says you should never use lemons in a restaurant.  Request your drink naked, it said.  But I live on iced tea and drinking that without a lemon would be like, well, french fries without ketchup.  Pizza without cheese.  Romeo without Juliet.  You get my drift. The article said that the reason lemon wedges are so dicey is because of all the people who don't wash their hands and then touch the food.  (Scary fact: only 15% of people wash their hands correctly after using the rest room.) On average, an adult can touch as many as 30 objects within a minute, including germ-harboring, high-traffic surfaces such as light switches, doorknobs, phone receivers and remote controls, according to AARP. And you don...

Childhood obesity news boring you to death?  Maybe this will ring your bell.  It costs $19,000 per child more for obese children than normal-weight ones for healthcare, according to a new study.  Not your problem?  But it is, because it often comes out of taxpayers' pockets. “Reducing childhood obesity is a public health priority that has substantial health and economic benefits,” newswise.com quotes lead study author Eric Andrew Finkelstein, Ph.D., M.H.A. “These estimates provide the financial consequences of inaction and the potential medical savings from obesity prevention efforts that successfully reduce or delay obesity onset.” Obesity is a known risk factor for a wide range of diseases, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and certain cancers. Roughly one in three adults and one in five children in the United States are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Addressing obesity in adults requires efforts to prev...

As if men didn't have enough to worry about, now a new study  links sudden declines in testosterone to Parkinson's disease symptoms, and possibly, the disease itself. According to newswise.com, you can relax.  It's only happening in mice.  “While scientists use different toxins and a number of complex genetic approaches to model Parkinson’s disease in mice, we have found that the sudden drop in the levels of testosterone following castration is sufficient to cause persistent Parkinson’s like pathology and symptoms in male mice,” Dr. Kalipada Pahan, lead author of the study and the Floyd A. Davis endowed professor of neurology at Rush, was quoted by the Web site. Still, since men's testosterone levels are "coupled" with many diseases, according to Pahan, it makes sense to look further when levels drop suddenly.  Drops in testosterone levels due to stress or other drastic events in a man's life can predispose him to Parkinson's-like symptoms, Pahan ...