mr-damon/health

"Experts say that most drugs, whatever the disease, work for only about half the people who take them. Not only is much of the nation's approximately $300 billion annual drug spending wasted, but countless patients are being exposed unnecessarily to side effects."

It's clear that long-term economic gains lead to improvements in a population's overall health, in developing and industrialized societies alike.

But whether the current economic slump will take a toll on your own health depends, in part, on your health habits when times are good. And economic studies suggest that people tend not to take care of themselves in boom times -- drinking too much (especially before driving), dining on fat-laden restaurant meals and skipping exercise and doctors' appointments because of work-related time commitments.

"The value of time is higher during good economic times," said Grant Miller, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford. "So people work more and do less of the things that are good for them, like cooking at home and exercising; and people experience more stress due to the rigors of hard work during booms."

Society venerates skinniness, but people identify mostly with those who have trouble measuring up. Oprah Winfrey was perhaps the first major star to humanize her weight struggle and ennoble it into a parable of redemption and self-discovery.

Now that kind of journey is engrained in the culture as Americana, an escalator-age version of a Horatio Alger story, from fat to thinness. Early in the 2008 campaign the dark horse who emerged as a Republican favorite was Mike Huckabee, a preacher and former governor of Arkansas who won over primary voters with his tale of huge weight loss as spiritual salvation. On talk shows Mr. Huckabee would hold up his campaign pledges and the bannerlike size 50 pants he wore in his previous life. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made herself likable by invoking Weight Watchers, while the naturally slender Senator Barack Obama has to watch how much he watches his carbs or risk alienating working-class voters.

Fat was rarely seen in the early days of television, and mostly, it was either funny or scary, Jackie Gleason or the profile silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock. Back then obesity wasn't an urgent concern or a national pastime, and it figured only at the margins of popular culture. Nowadays magazines and fashion designers cut their cloth to size zero, while the Health and Human Services Department warns that 65 percent of the population is overweight or obese. Thinness is a class-conscious fixation, but fat is a national rite of passage: like marriage, divorce or the death of a loved one, corpulence is something most people cope with at a point in their lives.

In a country where insurance is out of reach for many, it is not uncommon for couples to marry, or even to divorce, at least partly so one spouse can obtain or maintain health coverage.

There is no way to know how often it happens, but lawyers and patient advocacy groups say they see cases regularly.

In a poll conducted this spring by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research group, 7 percent of adults said someone in their household had married in the past year to gain access to insurance. The foundation cautions that the number should not be taken literally, but rather as an intriguing indicator that some Americans "are making major life decisions on the basis of health care concerns."

Stephen L. J. Hoffman, an officiant at a wedding chapel in Covington, Kentucky, said he was no longer shocked that one of 10 couples cite health insurance as the reason they stand before him.

"They come in and say, 'We were going to get married anyway, but right now we really need the insurance,' " said Hoffman. "There may be an unplanned pregnancy, or there is an illness, or they've lost their job and can't get insurance."

Though money and matrimony have been linked since Genesis, marrying for health coverage is a more modern convention. For today's couples, "in sickness and in health" may seem less a lover's troth than an actuarial contract. They marry for better or worse, for richer or poorer, for co-pays and deductibles.

Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst with the Environmental Working Group, said the database and rating system were based on an extensive review of the medical literature on sunscreens. Of nearly 1,000 sunscreens reviewed, the group recommends only 143 brands. Most are lesser-known brands with titanium and zinc, which are effective blockers of ultraviolet radiation. But they are less popular with consumers because they can leave a white residue.

The group is especially concerned about the safety of a compound called oxybenzone, which is used in most popular sunscreens. But the research on oxybenzone is limited.

Most recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed 2,517 urine samples collected in 2003-4 from a representative sample of the population over age 6 as part of a national health and nutrition survey. The analysis, published this month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found oxybenzone in 97 percent of the samples.

The study goes on to note that human exposure to oxybenzone "has not been associated with adverse health effects" and that sunscreen is an important tool to protect against sunburn and skin cancer. But the researchers said further study was needed to determine whether the chemical had any meaningful effect on the body.

As the popularity of granite countertops has grown in the last decade -- demand for them has increased tenfold, according to the Marble Institute of America, a trade group representing granite fabricators -- so have the types of granite available. For example, one source, Graniteland (graniteland.com) offers more than 900 kinds of granite from 63 countries. And with increased sales volume and variety, there have been more reports of "hot" or potentially hazardous countertops, particularly among the more exotic and striated varieties from Brazil and Namibia.

"It's not that all granite is dangerous," said Stanley Liebert, the quality assurance director at CMT Laboratories in Clifton Park, N.Y., who took radiation measurements at Dr. Sugarman's house. "But I've seen a few that might heat up your Cheerios a little."