Home Is Where the Health Is

The personal finance company WalletHub compared more than 180 of the largest U.S. cities across 41 composite metrics of health, from the cost of a medical visit to fruit and vegetable consumption to the share of physically active adults in the local population.

It found the top five "healthiest" cities were: San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Salt Lake City and Portland, Oregon. The five "unhealthiest" cities were Brownsville, Texas; Gulfport, Mississippi; Laredo, Texas; Shreveport, Louisiana, and Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Some key stats:

Overland Park, Kansas, has the lowest share of physically unhealthy adults -- two times lower than in Huntington, West Virginia, the city with the highest.

Augusta, Georgia, has the lowest cost per doctor's visit -- 2.9 times less expensive than in Juneau, Alaska, the city with the highest.

Portland, Maine, has the lowest share of adults eating fruits less than once daily -- 1.6 times lower than in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the city with the highest.

Columbus, Georgia, has the lowest average monthly cost for a fitness-club membership -- 15.7 times less expensive than in New York, the city with the highest.

Body of Knowledge

A sedentary human gives off heat at a rate of 100 joules per second, or 100 watts. This means that a class of 10 kindergartners is as good at heating a classroom as a kilowatt heater. There's no telling how hot a room gets with a class of 10 nonsedentary small humans.

Stories for the Waiting Room

By now, most people know that playing American-style football is bad for one's head, mostly from small studies and anecdotal stories of college and professional players suffering current or post-traumatic brain trauma.

But a new, broader survey of men aged 40 and older who played football at any time in their lives found they typically scored worse on a computerized cognitive test, had more concerns about their cognitive health and reported more severe symptoms of depression compared to those who hadn't experienced repeated head impacts.

A separate cohort of nearly 4,000 former football players -- with varying experience from youth leagues to professional play -- showed those who played longer and at higher levels displayed worse cognitive and neuropsychiatric function.

Doc Talk

Synchronous diaphragmatic flutter: A hiccup

Phobia of the Week

Amfisbitophobia: Fear of arguing. Enough said.

Food for Thought

Bacteriophages are viruses that specifically target and kill bacteria. The Food & Drug Administration has approved using specific strains for specific food safety uses as a natural, nontoxic biocontrol to treat foodborne pathogens, such as listeria, salmonella and E. coli in meats, dairy and fresh produce. It's said bacteriophages do not affect food flavor, texture or quality.

Bacteriophages are ubiquitous, estimated to be the most abundant biological entities on Earth, with an estimated 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles in every environment on the planet. They outnumber bacteria tenfold.

Best Medicine

Years of smoking finally caught up with Fred, who keeled over at work one morning, clutching his chest. As he was rushed to a hospital, paramedics peppered him with questions.

"Do you smoke?" asked a paramedic.

"No," Fred whispered. "I quit."

"That's good. When did you quit?"

"Around 9:30 this morning."

Hypochondriac's Guide

Marie Antoinette syndrome is a condition in which one's hair suddenly turns while, purportedly due to alopecia areata -- selected, rapid loss of pigmented hair. It's named after the French queen whose hair turned white after her capture during the French Revolution.

White hair, of course, was better than what happened next to Antoinette, who lost the rest of her hair when beheaded by guillotine on Oct. 16, 1793. (She was 38.)

Observation

"One lives in the hope of becoming a memory." -- Argentine poet Antonio Porchia (1885-1968)

Medical History

This week in 1878, the name Vaseline was registered as a trademark for petroleum jelly developed by English-born chemist Robert Augustus Chesebrough.

Almost 20 years earlier, Chesebrough had become interest in the petroleum oil boom and traveled to Titusville, Pennsylvania, the site of the first oil rush in the United States. Once there, his chemist's curiosity was caught up by a pasty residue that stuck to driller's rods and clogged their pumps.

Workers had found it to be useful on burns and cuts to promote healing. Chesebrough returned to Brooklyn and spent years experimenting to extract and purify the useful ingredient, which he dubbed "petroleum jelly." The marketing name Vaseline was coined by Chesebrough by combining the German word for water (wasser) with the Greek word for oil (elaion). He added the "ine" suffix at the end because that was a common practice at the time.

Perishable Publications

Many, if not most, published research papers have titles that defy comprehension. They use specialized jargon, complex words and opaque phrases like "nonlinear dynamics." Sometimes they don't, yet they're still hard to figure out. Here's an actual title of actual published research study: "Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?"

Published in the Journal of Forensic Legal Medicine in 2009, the researchers concluded that full and empty bottles both exceeded the minimum fracture-threshold of the human skull. Even light beers made no difference.

Self-Exam

Q: What percentage of the human brain is fat, by dry weight?

A) 10

B) 25

C) 45

D) 60

A: For an organ that is 75% water, the brain is remarkably fat. Indeed, it's the fattiest organ in the human body at a minimum 60% fat. In a sense, we're all fatuous.

Epitaphs

You're standing on my face. -- Headstone of Ian Rowlins (1983-2004) of Buffalo, New York

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To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.