Count me also as someone whose family collected food stamps when I was small. My mom stayed at home when I was a baby, then I went into daycare and she took work as a home health aide while my dad alternated between working as a delivery truck driver and going to grad school.

We also didn't eat fast food or junk food, since my parents were quasi-vegetarian hippies who wouldn't let that stuff through the front door. Mom cooked everything whole grain, whole food, from scratch. We're not fat, in fact all of us are very slender people. The trick was finding markets that would sell in bulk, and fortunately we lived in a suburb of Boston when I was very tiny and then moved to the whole-earth-hippie shangri la of Western Mass. when I was about three, so that type of food was available. The local co-op also issued their own form of food stamps, so we were still able to eat healthily even once we had too much income (!) to qualify.

I think we were lucky, though in that in both cases we were situated in areas where a large portion of the population was *really* into that lifestyle. If we'd lived in, say, Oklahoma City I'm not sure how long my folks would have been able to maintain.

So... This study ended in 1977? A million years ago? Why results only now? Is this sort of a Can't-Find-Monkeys-Might-As-Well-Use-Guatemalans thing?

Because they were studying pregnant women and small children. Those children born in 1977 would be 30 years old now, so the study tracked their cognitive development, educational progress, and eventual (one would hope) entrance into the job market. With 30 years of mental and social development, the researchers get a bigger picture of the effects of early nutritional intervention.

Mexican glass bottled Fresca (cane sugary natural goodness)

WHAT?? Is this only available in border states (I live in New England)? I LOVE LOVE LOVE Fresca, but the only stuff they have anymore has aspartame, and I can't stand that metallic aftertaste. My whole Fresca experience -- along with a whole set of Proustian memories of summers on the Cape at my grandfather's house, bologna sandwiches on white bread with Miracle Whip and potato chips, and Mayflower Beach -- has been destroyed by NutraSweet.

I would give my right arm for a bottle of Fresca with real sugar. (or maybe just lend use of my right arm to a one-armed person for a little while.)

I have two friends who survived the fire, but not without some pretty grisly physical and mental scarring. That line was really too much, and that's coming from a huge fan of gallows humor.

grass-fed cows taste better.

True dat. I had a ribeye steak from a grass fed cow a few weeks ago and it just about knocked me on my ass. Ridiculously good.

Are there any manly - or even vaguely masculine - male stars who provide what you would consider an adequate comparison?

Matthew McConaghey -- many many articles printed about his episodes of him being drunk, high, and playing bongos naked.

Woody Harrelson -- many many articles printed about his being high as a kite and his antics like climbing bridges and holding up traffic in San Francisco (causing one man to miss the birth of his first child)

Owen Wilson -- tried to off himself a couple of months ago

Heath Ledger is a totally unfair comparison; people said he did drugs and drank previously but had stopped both. He lived in a freaking condo in Brooklyn and schlepped his laundry to the laundromat himself, that's a long long way from falling out of a limo waving your pink bits at photographers.

When I look at Match.com and see ugly pictures of ugly men I am grateful to the women who do porn and stripping to take the pressure off the blue balls crowd, possibly stopping these will-never-get-laid-in-a-million-years men from going out and raping or just plain bothering women like me.

Wow, that's rough. I've been on Match, I'd really hate to think that people were talking about *me* like that.

Incidentally, I met one of the cutest boys I've ever seen on Match. No real sparks, but adorable and fun all the same.

Oh my god. Smoking. White hot. I get dizzy just looking at him.

Hail Bob!

Say hey to Ivan Stang.

There's a name out of my misspent youth. Give me liberty or give me death or feed me!

And this blather about putting young children in men's prisons, in the name of men's rights. That is so nuts, given the violence, rape, etc.

Because that doesn't happen in women's prisons. Not at all.

Men on average die at a younger age than women. Did they control for men and women of the same age? Men and women of different ages who are widowed? Still married? What?

If men die sooner, then more women are likely to be widowed than men, as each population ages. Maybe old women are lonely and sad because their husbands have died before them. I'd be probably be really depressed if my husband of many decades was dead, too.

I'm going to post that again:

Grief is not depression

THANK YOU! Sadness and grief are not pathologies, they are completely normal reactions to unpleasant circumstances.

If someone *didn't* feel tremendous sorrow at the death of a spouse, or watching their friends die, or having their children be far away and rarely seeing them, or being taken out of a home they'd lived in for 50 years and put into a nursing home, now *that* would be a mental state worth investigating.