Food is one of the great joys of life. Or it is for most people. And when I say “most people”, I mean me.
For my ex, food was fuel, nothing more – something to be burped down between video games, beer-drinking sessions and advancing his engineering career. While studying for his degree, his dinner would routinely consist of half a loaf of bread, two packets of cookies and a large bottle of Coke. Seriously.
That’s okay when you’re a bachelor (as long as your cholesterol can take it) but can you imagine how difficult it is to keep a relationship going when your interests in food are so unbalanced? We’d go to grab dinner and a movie, but be finished with our drive-thru so soon we had hours to kill before the opening credits rolled. And it’s hard to get really romantic over a meal without wine… or a table.

If you’re pregnant, try to eat healthy because eating junk food is bad for your baby. Duh. A study published in The Journal of Physiology found that female rats that were fed a diet of chips, cheese, muffins, and other processed foods throughout pregnancy and lactation had offspring that were overweight at birth and were born with a taste for junk food, kind of like babies whose moms used crack while they were in the womb. Female offspring were particularly affected by the mother’s diet. And don’t think this just applies to rodents: “Humans share a number of fundamental biological systems with rats, so there is good reason to assume the effects we see in rats may be repeated in humans,” said Neil Strickland, a professor at the Royal Veterinary College in London. [EurekAlert!]

We often hear about women trying to lose weight before their wedding, but here’s a story about a man doing so, and it’s not just a few extra pounds. Manuel Uribe, who has dropped 550 lbs. over the last two years, celebrates his 43rd birthday today, and his wish is to be able to walk down the aisle on his wedding—he hasn’t been able to leave his bed for the last six years. Still, his fiancée said they have a real relationship, including sex, and the only real issue is that her parents were concerned that her first husband, also obese, had died of respiratory failure. Manuel, who lives in Mexico, says his obesity began when he lived in the U.S. about 10 years ago and consumed a diet of junk food and soft drinks. “It is all because of the junk food,” he said. [CBS News]