"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

  Miyeokguk Health Benefits: A 450-Day Bowl of Healing Bon Appétit deputy food editor Hana Asbrink ate the same soup for 450 consecutive days. Not because she was on a diet. Not because she was following a trend. She had just given birth, and she was following a Korean tradition that stretches back centuries — eating miyeokguk, Korean seaweed soup, every single day during the postpartum period. "My mother brought a thermos of homemade miyeokguk to the hospital," she wrote. "During those ensuing days and sleepless nights of recovery, miyeokguk served as a constant." In Korea, this isn't unusual. It's expected. Every mother eats seaweed soup postpartum. And then — here's the part most Americans don't know — every Korean eats it on their birthday, every year, for the rest of their life. It's a bowl of gratitude to the mother who gave you life. But miyeokguk health benefits go beyond tradition. Modern research has confirmed that the seaweed i...

    The Fall That Almost Ended Everything It was a Sunday morning, about two years ago. I was walking down the stairs in my apartment building — the same stairs I'd taken thousands of times — when my foot slipped on the edge of a step. Not dramatically. Just a small misstep, the kind that happens to everyone. But instead of catching myself and moving on, I felt a sharp crack in my wrist as I grabbed the railing. Not a break — a fracture. A hairline fracture in my left wrist from gripping a metal railing too hard during a minor stumble. At the emergency room, the doctor looked at the x-ray and then looked at me. "This is a very minor impact for this kind of fracture," he said. "Have you had your bone density tested?" I hadn't. I was fifty-seven years old, and it had never occurred to me — or any doctor I'd visited — to check my bones. Bone density tests are something women get. Osteoporosis is a woman's disease. That's what I believed. Tha...