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I'm getting so tired of my husband warning me that all my running's going to wreck my knees , as it did his. And today, The New York Times' Gretchen Reynolds agreed with me.  Or, I should say, also disputed the threat. She blogs, " One of the most entrenched beliefs about running, at least among nonrunners, is that it causes arthritis and ruins knees."  But a new study is disproving that, she says.  The s tudy finds that "this idea is a myth and distance running is unlikely to contribute to the development of arthritis, precisely and paradoxically because it involves so much running." Huh? Reynolds reports that, as long as knees are healthy to start with, running does not substantially increase the risk of developing arthritis, even if someone jogs into middle age and beyond.  I've been running for over 30 years and, full disclosure, I don't run very fast, so that may be part of why my knees are as good as they were when I ran on the pl...

Loneliness stinks.  But did you know it's as bad as obesity, high blood pressure, lack of exercise or smoking when it comes to illness and early death, Jane Brody reports today in The New York Times. Brody quotes a doctor who has studied this,  John T. Cacioppo , an award-winning psychologist at the University of Chicago, who says loneliness is so detrimental and harmful because it "undermines people’s ability to self-regulate."  In one study done in Chicago, people who scored high on a test to determine loneliness ate far more fatty foods than people whose score was lower. In another study, people made to feel disconnected from others ate many more cookies than those who felt more connected.  Cacioppo told Brody that lonely people will do whatever they can to make themselves feel better -- eat, smoke, drink, (in my case) shop, even have indiscriminate sex -- all to get rid of that clammy, awful feeling. Loneliness can also hurt us by increasing stress hormone...