Cynical Activities - S
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SEAFOOD, EATING
Of all the things people eat, seafood is most likely to cause food-poisoning outbreaks. Shellfish contaminated by sewage kill twenty-five thousand people each year and cause 2.5 million cases of hepatitis. In addition, methylmercury in seafood may cause neurological problems in as many as sixty thousand children annually, leading to recommendations by various groups that pregnant women avoid eating swordfish, king mackerel, shark, tilefish, tuna steaks, sea bass, oysters from the Gulf of Mexico, marlin, halibut, pike, walleye, white croaker, and large-mouth bass. Remember how, way back when, they used to call it "brain food"? |
SEAFOOD, NOT EATING
Men on a fish-free diet are two to three times more likely to get prostate cancer than men who eat lots of fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, and herring. Pregnant women who eat too little fish are more likely to have premature babies (but then, see above; by the time you find a fish that isn't a major source of methylmercury, the kid will be in college anyway). A study has found that people who eat fish less than once a week run a 31 percent higher risk of mild to severe depression than people who eat it more often. Older adults who don't eat fatty fish each week are more likely to die of heart attacks. If you're a smoker, not eating lots of fresh fish means you're more likely to get lung cancer but then, that obviously doesn't bother you too much. |
SEATTLE
If you've been heading up the West Coast from San Diego in search of a peaceful drive to work, forget it: in that study of American cities, Seattle was fifth worst in terms of traffic, with almost half of travel taking place in congested conditions. |
SELF-ESTEEM
Recent studies suggest that the higher your self-esteem, the more likely you are to be a threat to the people around you. |
SEX
Way back when your Sunday school teacher and your mother told you never to do the nasty, they had a point. We've got a list of sexually transmitted diseases as long as your...whatever: AIDS, hepatitis B, human papillomaviruses (which cause genital warts and cancer), chlamydia, trichomoniasis, syphilis, gonorrhea, pediculosis, and many more. A lot of these can kill you and the rest make you wish you were dead. Plus, men who have a large number of sexual partners have a higher risk of prostate cancer. (We're sure this news will change your life forever. Britney: Yes! Yes! Take me now, you big stud rhino! You: No, honey, I don't want to get prostate cancer in forty years, let's just cuddle.) Oh, and sex can also lead to dehydration, though that's the least of your problems. |
SEX, ONLINE
If you're addicted to cybersex (there are about two hundred thousand of you out there in the U.S. alone, and you know who you are), you may end up locking yourself away with your modem for hours at a time, lingering online at the office, forgetting to do the dishes or pick up your children at school, losing interest in normal sexual activities, becoming withdrawn and brooding, and then hiding your credit card bills and lying about your reasons for using the Internet. If you move it offline and hook up with HotLilMuffin or SagittarianStud for a quickie, you're more likely to get sexually transmitted diseases than if you make your contacts in other ways. |
SEX, ORAL
Whatever Debbie back in seventh grade told you, you can't get pregnant through oral sex; you can, however, get AIDS and other unpleasant diseases. More and more teenagers are having oral sex, and this has led to reports of dramatic increases in oral herpes and gonorrhea of the pharynx. In extreme cases, oral sex can cause months of Senate hearings and endless bad jokes about blue cocktail dresses. |
SHAMPOOING
According to the British Stroke Association, people have suffered strokes while bending their heads over basins to have their hair washed by hairdressers. |
SHIFT WORK
Working night shifts may give you peptic ulcers, breast cancer, and heart and blood pressure problems. It may also make you less alert and more accident-prone, and these effects get worse when workers rotate shifts rather than sticking to a late-night routine. This should reassure you everywhere from the ER (where it's been found that surgeons make more mistakes after long night shifts) to the night train. |
SHOPPING CARTS
We all know shopping carts have minds of their own, but every now and then they can turn vicious. More than twenty thousand children under six are treated in hospital emergency rooms in the U.S. each year for shopping-cart injuries. The shopping carts involved are painlessly put to sleep. |
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