The Check-Up: Today’s Top Health Headlines

Young and healthy? You should marry this guy.

• A Florida rabbi is looking for a wife who can cook, clean…and help lower his insurance bill? Yes, it’s true, NPR reports. Fifty-six-year-old Craig Ezring, a rabbi in Boca Raton, receives insurance coverage through a small corporation he formed with his wife, who died four years ago. When he received his latest health-insurance bill this month, “Ezring said he almost had a heart attack,” according to the news outlet. His costs, it seems, rose 38 percent this year—to $18,636. He was told his insurance rate is based on the age of the company’s owner. So now, Ezring’s looking for a young whipper-snapper marry and save him some cash. “Give some thought to the possibility of marrying me … a good insurance plan is all I ask,” he wrote on his blog. “Okay there maybe one or two other things I ask for, but sadly, right now insurance has become a top priority.”

• Remember the Sidler from that Seinfeld episode, where Elaine’s co-worker keeps sneaking up on her—and thus, becomes dubbed “the Sidler”? Turns out, Elaine should have embraced the awkward sidling. According to a new (and somewhat bizarre) study, socially awkward and anti-social people are keenest at detecting and responding to potentially dangerous situations. In the study, which involved a ruse where participants were led to believe a computer had suddenly caught fire, those “with higher levels of avoidance responded faster.” So please, go hug your awkward friend.

• Sigh. Another potential side effect of rising obesity rates: New research has found evidence that women who are overweight or obese when they become pregnant may be more likely to have children who develop asthma later in life. The study of 7,000 Finnish teenagers found that those whose mothers were overweight or obese during pregnancy were 20 to 30 percent more likely to have asthma.

• Trying to stick to your diet? A study out of Texas A&M University, which looked at the effect of positive emotions on eating choices, found that “forward-thinking feelings like hopefulness led to better dietary choices, while positive emotions like happiness weren’t necessarily conducive to self-control,” reports TIME.com. In the study, subjects who were primed to feel happy ate 44 percent more M&M’s than those who were thinking about the future. So…here’s to tomorrow!