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On Christmas (hopefully), our thoughts turn to giving, but on Thanksgiving, our thoughts turn to that turkey we’re going to dine on with friends and family. Turkey is still fairly unknown in Europe, but Americans are eating over 100% more of it each year than we did 35 years ago. How is today’s turkey different from the one the Pilgrims ate?

Turkey expert Nickolas Zimmermann says, “Turkeys in the days of the Pilgrims were similar to the wild turkeys that are now abundant in most states of the nation. They have dark plumage and can fly. Modern turkeys have been bred to have large breast muscles, desired by consumers. Modern turkeys also have been bred to have white feathers, so that pigment from dark feathers does not blemish the skin.
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The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays have long been an especially painful season for lonely people. Now, there’s good news: Suicide rates among younger and older Americans have been declining since the early 1990s. There’s also puzzling news: No one really knows why.

Researcher Robert McKeown says, “For 40 years adolescent suicide rates rose. Then, the rates began to decline in the late 1980s for adults 65 and older and in the early 1990s for adolescents and young adults. But many people weren’t aware; they kept saying suicides were increasing when it was no longer true.
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We may not be related to Neanderthals, but we ARE related to small sea creatures called sea urchins! The Sea Urchin Genome Sequencing Project (SUGSP) Consortium (yes, there is such a thing) has announced that they have succeeded in decoding the DNA of the sea urchin…and found it surprisingly similar to ours.

They found more than 814 million DNA “letters,” spelling out 23,300 genes. Nearly 10,000 of the genes were scrutinized by an international consortium of 240 scientists from 11 countries. According to biologist Judith Venuti, “Unraveling the sea urchin genome has yielded striking similarities and surprising differences between sea urchins and humans.”
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We recently wrote about how worry can actually make you sick, and it turns out that fear can make you fat?if you’re too afraid of crime in your neighborhood to go out and take a walk.

Older adults living in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods have an increased risk of obesity and this may be due to fear caused by living in areas characterized by crime, disorder and neglect.

Epidemiologist Thomas Glass says, “There is almost a twofold higher chance that you?re going to be obese if you live in the worst neighborhoods. Moreover, the risk is not something that can be explained away by personal variables such as dietary intake, tobacco use and household wealth.”
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