Eating instructions! Stair running! Five Hour Energy! Ballet bodies! Polar bear workout! Polio elimination! Winter blues! Exercise brain! Diabetes everywhere! As well as racist doctors! It's your Monday Health Watch, where we watch your health—again and again, unsuccessfully!

  • The government has released its new dietary guidelines for Americans, which are as follows: "Look, we've said it a million fucking times. We've made charts, we've had celebrities say it, we've spent who knows how much on fucking cutesy commercials and pamphlets and websites and all that. Yet here we are. This is the last time we're saying this: eat less fucking food."
  • Want to be in top physical shape, or dead? Run up the stairs of the Empire State Building.
  • Tragedy! Could it be that 5 Hour Energy, that orange-bottled nectar of the gods, is nothing more than "slightly caffeinated, sour-tasting water"? Well yes, of course, what in the world else would it be? I wonder about you, sometimes.
  • Do you desire the body that Natalie Portman had in Black Swan? Just do this workout, and then somehow also fill your body up with downy, troubling feathers.
  • Think you're a big exerciser? One polar bear begs to disagree—because she swam 426 miles across Arctic seas just to find a piece of ice to hold on to! Eat your heart out, Michael Phelps! Also her baby died along the way.
  • Bill Gates wants to eliminate polio. Critics point out that the disease is already down 99%, and the money would be better spent eradicating other, more prevalent dangers. Like nerdiness.
  • "Winter depression" or "seasonal affective disorder" is mostly linked to lower levels of sunlight in winter months. To "beat the blues," the only things you really need are a sunlamp and a five-month supply of Oxycontin.
  • Old people who are really into "brisk walking" tend to have better memories, mostly, we imagine, so they can find their way home.
  • The CDC says that more than 100 million Americans could potentially suffer from diabetes. Experts confirm that is a lot.
  • Oh snap: a new study finds that doctors are less likely to offer weight counseling to obese black patients than to obese white patients. The scourge of doctors must be wiped from the face of this earth if America is ever to move forward as one united, obese nation.

[Photo: stevehager]