One of the laziest submissions of open questions. Most have completely uninteresting well known answers:<p>* Obesity: We are eating more. We are eating higher calorie foods. We are also eating more sugar. The days of cooking raw foods in the home are few, and when we do, we do so by cooking with pre-prepared items that tend to have high caloric intake without many of the previous dietary benefits.<p>Most families are down to one non-starchy vegetable a day, arguing that the tiny amount of pasta sauce counts as a vegetable as it contains tomatoes, ignoring the added sugar. To fix this, people are willing to sell us a never ending stream of services and advice, where the most effective advice is deemed uninteresting compared to the attention grabbing advice.<p>Our health industry has spawned a wellness industry, where we are being told that blending our fruits and vegetables (releasing more sugar) need to be sweetened with honey (more sugar) as it is more healthy than table sugar. Here is a clue, just don't blend the stuff and eat it; but, that would hardly spawn an industry.<p>- Alcohol: Yes, there have been numerous studies that moderate wine drinking can have health benefits. The main issue is that drinking in the USA probably involves at a minimum more alcohol than would qualify as healthy, and it is a relative health benefit that can easily be cancelled by too much ethanol.<p>Here's a hint, food is a mixture. Drinking gin-and-tonics might also prevent malaria, a health benefit, but give you cirrhosis of the liver, a health hazard. Mixtures do that.<p>- Boogers: Any biology student knows that they are primarily comprised of sugars, and are a mixture of sugar, whatever else is in the nose, and water. Why do they come in so many varieties? Sugar is flexible, making up trees, sugar glass, sugar for your coffee, and much, much more. No news here.<p>- Jeanne Calment: Most people believe she took over the identity of a relative to avoid inheritance tax. The French government refuses to entertain this idea, as they prefer to have a national icon. This is well covered in the article, but in a fit of "let's disregard the contradicting ideas" is summarily dismissed with "the fraud theory seems highly unlikely to explain the Calment anomaly" because, they're already believing Clament is an anomaly and thus cannot believe she isn't.<p>Oddly enough the Clament story is just like the other items in the list. If you start from a position of believing something is unusual, you have to assume that any bland explanation must fail because it wouldn't make it an unusual item.