Yasmin Tayag

The twinkling of lit-up trees and festive displays in store windows have come to mean two things: The holidays are upon us, and so is COVID. Since the pandemic began, the week between Christmas and New Year’s has coincided with the dreaded “winter wave.” During that dark period, cases have reliably surged after rising throughout the fall. The holiday season in 2020 and 2021 marked the two biggest COVID peaks to date, with major spikes in infections that also led to hospitalizations and deaths.

Yesterday, America had one of its worst days of bird flu to date. For starters, the CDC confirmed the country’s first severe case of human bird-flu infection. The patient, a Louisiana resident who is over the age of 65 and has underlying medical conditions, is in the hospital with severe respiratory illness and is in critical condition. This is the first time transmission has been traced back to exposure to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks.

Across the country, the thirst for an illicit beverage is growing. Raw milk can’t be sold legally for human consumption in many states, but some 11 million Americans drink it anyway as wellness influencers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., extol its benefits. They do so despite a well-established risk of disease and death: E. coli, salmonella, and listeria have all been found in unpasteurized milk.
This year, a new pathogen has been added to the list.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest spin on MAGA, “Make frying oil tallow again,” is surprisingly straightforward for a man who has spent decades downplaying his most controversial opinions. Last month, Kennedy argued in an Instagram post that Americans were healthier when restaurants such as McDonald’s cooked fries in beef tallow—that is, cow fat—instead of seed oils, a catchall term for common vegetable-derived oils including corn, canola, and sunflower.

The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the color of my blouse. Never again would I twist underneath a hand dryer to dry my damp underarms. It was time to try clinical-strength antiperspirant.
The one I bought looked like any old antiperspirant, a solid white cream encased in a plastic applicator.

Americans don’t typically have a reason to think about the fluoride in their water, but this is not a typical week. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former independent presidential candidate whom Donald Trump is eyeing as his health czar, has vowed to remove the mineral from drinking water if he is appointed to the next administration. Kennedy has said that the chemical lowers children’s IQ, even though studies overwhelmingly show that it is safe.

The promise of the American food supply is that you can eat anything and not get sick. You can usually assume that whatever you buy from a grocery store or fast-food joint won’t land you in a hospital.
But lately, foodborne-illness outbreaks seem to be distressingly regular. On Tuesday, the CDC reported 49 cases and one death linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders tainted with E. coli.

There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan.
It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger.

Recently, in a few cities across the country, Starbucks quietly unveiled a pair of drinks, one resembling a pistachio milkshake, the other a mossy sludge. Unlike with green beverages already on the Starbucks menu, their hue does not come from matcha, mint, or grapes. They are green because they contain actual greens—or, at least, a dried and powdered form of them sold by the supplement company AG1.

Something weird is happening on my Instagram feed. Between posts of celebrities with perfect skin are pictures of regular people—my own friends!—looking just as good. They’re in their mid-30s, yet their faces look so smooth, so taut and placid, that they look a full decade younger. Is it makeup? Serums? Supplements? Sleep? When I finally inquired as to how they’d pulled it off, they gladly offered an explanation: “baby Botox.

A grim and all too familiar scene played out on Thursday night as the Miami Dolphins faced off against the Buffalo Bills. Racing toward the end zone, the Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa crashed headfirst into a Bills defender. Tagovailoa went limp, his head ricocheting off the field while his right arm involuntarily swung upward, fingers clawing at the sky. As Tagovailoa tried to get up, he looked dazed. Minutes later, he was taken out of the game with a concussion.

Up until last Friday afternoon, a total of 13 people in the United States had officially come down this year with avian influenza H5, also known as bird flu. A subtype of that virus, a potential pandemic pathogen called H5N1, has for months been circulating in our dairy herds, and has already killed tens of millions of birds here. The 13 human cases through last Friday were generally mild, and more important, they were all clearly linked to sickened cows or poultry.

A well-stocked grocery store is a wondrous place. Among the gleaming pyramids of fruit, golden rows of bread, and freezers crammed with ice cream, time and space collapse. A perfectly ripe apple might have been picked a year ago; a cut of beef may have come from an Australian cow. Grocery stores defy seasons and geography to assure shoppers that they can have anything they want, anytime.

Last Thursday was not a good day for Joe Biden. During the president’s shaky and at times incoherent debate performance, he appeared weaker and frailer in real time than the American public had ever seen. Friday appears to have been a much better day. At a campaign rally in North Carolina, clips of which his campaign distributed online, the president seemed like an entirely different man. Lively and invigorated, he spoke with a ferocity that had eluded him on the debate stage.

Times are tough for omnivores. By now, you’ve heard all the reasons to eat less meat: your health, the planet, the animals. All that might be true, but for many meat-eaters, vegetables aren’t always delicious on their own. Pitiful are the collards without the ham hock, the peppers without the sausage, the snap peas without the shrimp.
In my family’s universe, meat is the sun around which vegetables, beans, and grains revolve. Take it away, and dinner descends into chaos.

Every meal I make begins with a single choice: extra-virgin olive oil or canola? For as long as I’ve cooked, these have been my kitchen workhorses, because they’re versatile, affordable, and—most of all—healthy. Or so I thought.
These days, every trip to the grocery store makes me second-guess myself. Lined up next to the bottles of basics such as canola, vegetable, and corn oil are relatively exotic—and expensive—options: grapeseed oil, pumpkin-seed oil, walnut oil.

There’s no such thing as a miracle cure for weight loss, but the latest obesity drugs seem to come pretty close. People who take Ozempic or other weekly shots belonging to a class known as GLP-1 agonists, after the gut hormone they mimic, can lose a fifth or more of their body weight in a year. Incessant “food noise” fueling the urge to eat suddenly goes silent.
In recent months, the mystique of these drugs has only grown.

Every day, the blogger Alex Lyons orders the same salad from the same New York City bodega and eats it in the same place: her desk. She eats it while working so that she can publish a story before “prime time”—the midday lunch window when her audience of office workers scrolls mindlessly on their computers while gobbling down their own salad.

Milk is defined by its percentages: nonfat, 2 percent, whole. Now there is a different kind of milk percentage to keep in mind. Last week, the FDA reported that 20 percent of the milk it had sampled from retailers across the country contained fragments of bird flu, raising concerns that the virus, which is spreading among animals, might be on its way to sickening humans too.

Good chocolate, I’ve come to learn, should taste richly of cocoa—a balanced blend of bitter and sweet, with notes of fruit, nuts, and spice. My favorite chocolate treat is nothing like that. It’s the Cadbury Creme Egg, an ovoid milk-chocolate shell enveloping a syrupy fondant center. To this day, I look forward to its yearly return in the weeks leading up to Easter.
Most popular chocolate is like this: milky, sugary, and light on actual cocoa.

On Sunday evening, I fed a bowl of salmon, broccoli, and rice to my eight-month-old son. Or rather, I attempted to. The fish went flying; greens and grains splattered across the walls. Half an hour later, bedtime drew near, and he hadn’t eaten a thing. Exasperated, I handed him a baby-food pouch—and he inhaled every last drop of apple-raspberry-squash-carrot mush.
For harried parents like myself, baby pouches are a lifeline.

The irony undergirding the new wave of obesity drugs is that they initially weren’t created for obesity at all. The weight loss spurred by Ozempic, a diabetes drug in the class of so-called GLP-1 agonists, gave way to Wegovy—the same drug, repackaged for obesity. Zepbound, another medication, soon followed. Now these drugs have a new purpose: heart health.

Last Friday, in a bathroom at the Newark airport, I encountered a phrase I hadn’t seen in a long time: Stop the spread. It accompanied an automatic hand-sanitizing station, which groaned weakly when I passed my hand beneath it, dispensing nothing. Presumably set up in the early pandemic, the sign and dispenser had long ago become relics. Basically everyone seemed to ignore them.

In my childhood home, an often-repeated phrase was “All disease begins in the gut.” My dad, a health nut, used this mantra to justify his insistence that our family eat rice-heavy meals, at the exact same time every day, to promote regularity and thus overall health. I would roll my eyes, dubious that his enthusiasm for this practice was anything more than fussiness.
Now, to my chagrin, his obsession has become mainstream.

No medication in the history of modern weight loss has inspired as much awe as the latest class of obesity drugs. Wegovy and Zepbound are so effective that they are often likened to “magic” and “miracles.” Indeed, the weekly injections, which belong to a broader class known as GLP-1s, can lead to weight loss of 20 percent or more, fueling hype about a future in which many more millions of Americans take them.

Several years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to eat more plants. Doing so, I assumed, would be better for my health, for animals, and for the planet. Besides, it would be easy: The rise of plant-based meat alternatives, offered by companies such as Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat, made it a breeze to eat less meat but still satisfy the occasional carnivorous urge. I could have my burger and eat it too.Or so I thought.

When the weather turns frigid, there is only one thing to do: make a pot of chicken-noodle soup. On the first cold afternoon in early December, I simmered a whole rotisserie chicken with fennel, dill, and orzo, then ladled it into bowls for a cozy family meal. Just as I thought we’d reached peak hygge, my five-month-old son suddenly grabbed my steaming bowl and tipped the soup all over himself. Piercing screams and a frenzied taxi ride to the pediatric emergency room ensued.

Within the first five seconds of a recent Ozempic commercial, a sky-blue injector pen tumbles toward the viewer, encircled by a big red O. Obesity drugs have become so closely associated with injections that the two are virtually synonymous. Like Ozempic, whose name is now a catchall term for obesity drugs, Wegovy and Zepbound come packaged in Sharpie-like injection pens that patients self-administer once a week.

One night in July, a few weeks after my son was born, I lay awake, desperately scrolling through photos of injured feet. The mounting pain from an ingrown toenail in my right foot had become excruciating, and the internet promised to help. I could no longer deny the fact that the exorbitantly expensive Hoka sneakers I’d bought just months before—to prevent pregnancy-related foot pain—had become too small. To my horror, my feet had grown half a size. Permanently.

If anything defines America’s current obesity-drug boom, it’s this: Many more people want these injections than can actually get them. The roadblocks include exorbitant costs that can stretch beyond $1,000 a month, limited insurance coverage, and constant supply shortages. But before all of those issues come into play, anyone attempting to get a prescription will inevitably confront the same obstacle: their body mass index, or BMI.