About $25 million in new grants will go toward improvements like slicers for fruits and vegetables and better storage for fresh food. The USDA says it will proportionally split the funds among state agencies

The USDA announced on Friday that it is awarding $25 million in grants for schools in need of kitchen equipment to cook up healthier food.

The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently released a report showing that 88% of school districts need at least one piece of kitchen equipment and 50% need infrastructure changes in order to provide healthier meals. For instance, some schools lack storage space for fresh food and proper slicers and choppers for cutting up fruits and vegetables. (Currently, around 90% of schools say they are meeting the requirements for school lunches, which set rules for calories and availability of foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat milk.)

“We know that there is still a significant unmet need for kitchen equipment in schools, and outdated equipment can make it more difficult to prepare healthy meals,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a statement. “With these grants, schools will be able to get the tools they need to make the healthy choice the easy choice for America’s youngsters.”

The USDA says it will proportionally split the funds among state agencies, and within the states, districts will be awarded various sums, with the majority going to the schools in the highest needs where at least 50% or more of the students attending are on a free or reduced-cost meal plan.

One woman's quest to eliminate the sweet stuff, and how she felt when she came out the other side.

“It just made so much sense to me,” says author Eve O. Schaub after watching a YouTube video called “Sugar: A Bitter Truth,” a lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). It prompted her to embark on a yearlong quest to put her family on a sugar diet, cutting out everything from table sugar to any food product with added sugar. It was no easy task; they discovered that meant eliminating anything from brownies to cold cuts. In her new book, Year of No Sugar, Schuab documents how they managed their not-so-sweet year. TIME asked the author about her journey, and tips for how to curb one’s sugar consumption.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

What inspired you to take this on?
I’ve always been interested in food from a very young age, and I like to cook and bake. I’ve also been interested in how food correlates with how we feel, and our health. I was a vegetarian for two decades, so I have been on some other food-related paths. I was really ready to hear the message when I watched the YouTube video. Something about it really clicked. Everywhere I went after that, I felt like I suddenly had sugar vision and I saw what everyone didn’t see. I thought, ah hah, what if we stopped eating sugar entirely, and what if we tried to do it for a year?

How long did it take you to go grocery shopping?
It used to take me about 45 minutes to do a normal shopping trip, and this one took me an hour and a half. I should have brought my magnifying glass and my dictionary. I was reading and reading and astounded by how much I didn’t know. It made me mad, because food shouldn’t be this hard. I was stubborn about reading every last ingredient because I wanted to make sure we were following our own parameters. But once I did that recon, it was done. I knew what we could buy and what was off-limits.

Any tips for navigating the grocery store. Any surprising items to avoid?
Going straight to produce is great. Not everyone wants to make their own crackers, for example. There are some things that are really hard–I wouldn’t say you can never find a no sugar version—but it can be very hard. And they are things that are not sweet, so they’re unexpected. For example, bread is a big one, especially the sandwich breads. My family went to the bread aisle and came up with 250 some different varieties of bread, and we could only find a variety from one manufacturer that did not contain added sugar. But there are plenty of other unusual food products with sugar. I found sugar in sausages, tortellini, tortillas, mayonnaise, ketchup, cold cuts. I ultimately came to the conclusion that there is almost nothing they will not try to put sugar in.

Is it possible to dine out on this diet?
It is—we did. First, we found out which places were making their own food. We were astonished to find that some restaurants did not necessarily know what was in their own food. We learned how to ask questions. Once we got to the point that we knew what restaurants made their own sauces and dressings and knew what was in it, we would go back again and again. They got to know us and would ask how it was going.

Was it hard to travel?
You have to plan snacks ahead. At every convenience store, you’re lucky if you can find a banana. They will try to have healthy snacks. They will have things like yogurt, granola bars, and power bars. But sadly they often as much sugar as a candy bar, up to 25 grams of sugar.

Was dessert ever a possibility?
Just because we weren’t having sugar didn’t mean we weren’t having dessert. I did a lot of experimenting with old favorite recipes of mine. I would alter things I always made, like cookies and bars, with things like bananas and dates. We made banana ice cream, which we loved.

Your family ended up using dextrose often. Can you explain what that is?
It’s not fructose. I found the question of dextrose confusing. I asked Dr. Robert Lustig, and he was very kind in replying and letting me know that dextrose was glucose, so for our fructose-free purposes, it was perfectly fine. It’s about one-third the sweetness of table sugar, and it’s made of corn. Right now, as far as I know, you can only get it by mail order.

How did you survive the holidays?
The holidays can be especially challenging and there is this sense that we need sugar to celebrate. We need to mark the occasion with something even more crazy special and sweet than we are already having in our every day lives. It can be very difficult to navigate that delicately because you don’t want that person to come away feeling rejected because you didn’t eat their meal. We would let it be known that this is something that we would be doing, and ask if there was anything we could bring. That way we have at least one thing we can eat. Once you do the research, you know where it is. You know it’s going to be in the ham because if the glaze, it’s going to be any potato salad and coleslaw. We knew that when we went to aunt Carol’s house, the safe thing for us would be the mac and cheese.

How do you get kids on board?
My kids were the most excited when they were actively participating. They would love making banana ice cream themselves. Kids get so excited about food and where it comes from and watching food cook, and I think that’s the key to getting kids to care about food and love the taste of fresh, healthy, and homemade food.

What can people expect from cutting their sugar consumption?
Not eating sugar affects everyone in different ways. None of us really lost weight, but we were not looking to. The kids didn’t seem to be noticeably calmer, but hyperactivity wasn’t something we were trying to address either. I, in particular, had more energy, and that is something I have struggled with for as long as I can remember. On a regular basis I would crash and feel like I had a total lack of energy. When I do not eat sugar, I have plenty of energy. We felt healthier and it seemed to me that we did not get sick as much or for as long. My daughters missed 10 to 15 days of school the year before, and in the year of no sugar they missed two to three. That seems like better health.

Is this easier for someone who likes to cook?
I think it helps a lot if you like to cook. If I had trouble buying bread, I knew I would enjoy making it at home, if I could find the time. But you don’t have to love to cook to take in less sugar. There are lots of ways we can cut of sugar consumption and feel better. For instance, cut out drinking sugar. Have a sparkling water instead of a soda. For people who say they don’t have time, I wish we could place more emphasis on food as being important and worthy of our time. Perhaps we don’t have a lot of time, but making your own tomato sauce takes about 20 minutes.

Do you still avoid sugar?
After we finished our year, everyone expected us to go on a sugar binge to make up for lost time. We found that we had really lost a lot of our craving for super sweet foods. It was a little rocky at first because we had no rules. It had been hard on no sugar, but it had been clear. Over time we came to a middle ground, which I call “high level sugar avoiders.” I refuse to buy things that have sugar in them as an added ingredient, especially if it’s something that’s not sweet, doesn’t need it, and no one knows it’s there. We will have a sugary sweet once in a great while. I’d say 99 times out of 100 we are not having sugar, but for a special occasion we will have something. It will be small, and it will be special.

Do you recommend other people try this?
They don’t have to because I did it for them! The best advice I can give is to be aware and be judicious. Being aware means reading ingredients and asking questions. Being judicious means making sure you don’t get on that sugar escalator so you don’t have a little today, then more tomorrow, then more after that.

From humanity's earliest era, we had evolved to distinguish in-groups from out-groups and to assign powerful value to those differences. Call it racism, but it helped us survive

You always suspected babies were no good, didn’t you? They’re loud, narcissistic, spoiled, volatile and not exactly possessed of good table manners. Now it turns out that they’re racists too.

The latest evidence for that decidedly unlovely trait comes from research out of the University of Washington that actually sought to explore one of babies’ more admirable characteristics: their basic sense of fairness. In the study, 15-month-old toddlers watched an experimenter with a collection of four small toys share them either evenly or unevenly with two other adult volunteers. When allowed to choose which experimenters the babies wanted to play with later, 70% of them preferred the ones who had divided the toys evenly.

Nice, but there was an exception: when the two adults who were receiving the evenly or unevenly divided toys were of different races and the race of the one who got more toys matched the babies’ own, the 70% preference for the fair distributor dropped and the share of babies wanting to play with the unfair one rose. The implication: unfairness is bad, unless someone from your clan is getting the extra goodies.

“If all babies care about is fairness, they would always pick the fair distributor,” said University of Washington associate professor psychology of Jessica Somerville, in a statement that accompanied the study. “But we’re also seeing that they’re interested in consequences for their own group members.”

OK, so that doesn’t speak well of human nature at even its sweetest and most ingenuous stage. But here’s the thing: if we weren’t rank racists when we were very little, the species probably never would have survived. The idea of in-group bias is well established in behavioral science, and it has its roots long ago, in humanity’s tribal era. The fact is, the people in your own band are more likely to nurture you, care for you and protect you from harm, while the people from the tribe over the hill are more likely to, well, eat you.

As soon as you become old enough to toddle away from the campfire and wander out on your own, it thus pays to recognize, at a glance, what an alien other looks like. Sometimes it’s dress or hairstyle that provides the telltale cue, but just as often it’s skin tone, hair texture and the shape of facial features. It was the human tendency to migrate and settle in parts of the world with varying climates that caused these physical differences to emerge in the first place.

“We didn’t start off as a multi-racial species,” psychologist Liz Phelps of New York University told me in my upcoming book about narcissism. “We have races simply because we dispersed.” Once we did disperse, however, those differences in appearance—skin tone especially—turbocharged our suspicion of the outsider.

A study by psychologist Yarrow Dunham, now at Yale University, showed that color is an especially salient feature for very young people to overlook. Children in a classroom experiment who were divided into two groups and given two different color t-shirts to wear were, later on, much likelier to remember good things about all of the children who wore their color shirt and bad things about the ones who wore the other. “Kids will begin to show these preferences right away, in the lab, on the spot,” Dunham told me. “It’s not just a preference, it’s also a learning bias—the children actually learn differentially about the in-group and the out-group.”

Sometimes, for small children, there can be a certain sweetness to the bias, since they may feel concern for the person of a different race, the assumption being that anyone who doesn’t look like them must be unhappy about that fact. When my older daughter was three or four years old, we approached an African American cashier in a store and she asked her, “Are you sad that you don’t have light skin?” I winced and began to splutter an apology, but the woman answered, “No, honey. Are you said that you don’t have dark skin?” When my daughter said no, the woman responded, “So you see? We’re both happy with who we are.”

The sweet phase of simply noticing racial differences fades, to be replaced either by a higher awareness of the meaningless of such matters or a toxic descent into assigning ugly, negative values to them. Which way any one baby goes depends on upbringing, community, era, temperament and a whole range of other variables. What we will never be, like it or not, is an entirely post-racial species. Our better impulses may wish that weren’t so, but our ancient impulses will always test us. They are tests we must, from babyhood, learn to pass.

(DALLAS) — Twin boys who were born conjoined have been released from the Dallas hospital that’s been their home since birth.

Owen and Emmett Ezell were joined at the abdomen and shared a liver and intestines when born. They were separated at Medical City Children’s Hospital last August.

Mother Jenni Ezell says the now-9-month-old twins can sit up and that they try to coo over the trachea tubes that help them breathe. They are fed through tubes in their abdomens.

At a Wednesday news conference, she described them as “very interactive, very social little boys” who “flash smiles and wave” at visitors.

Neonatologist Dr. Clair Schwendeman says he is optimistic for the still “fragile” boys.

The twins will spend the next month in an inpatient rehabilitation center before being allowed home.

Vigorous exercise is better than moderate exercise at boosting the immune system.

You know that vigorous exercise burns fat and builds muscle (and it may even help fight cravings)—and now you might be able to add “fight the flu” to its list of accomplishments, according to research recently released at National Science and Engineering Week.

Through an online survey, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine polled more than 4,800 people on their health habits and found that those who exercised vigorously for at least two and a half hours a week were about 10 percent less likely to come down with a flu-like illness. Meanwhile, moderate exercise didn’t seem to have any effect on the flu.

While all exercise is known to increase immunity, previous research in the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology shows that high-intensity exercise is better than moderate exercise at improving the body’s aerobic capacity, a marker of overall health and fitness. And the fitter you are, the more likely your immune system will be able to wipe out nasty cells like the flu bug.

Cold or Flu: Can you Tell

However, it’s important to remember that overdoing it on high-intensity exercise can actually wear down the immune system, per a 2014 study in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research. Luckily, two and a half hours of high-intensity exercise a week is all your need to reap the flu-fighting benefits of hardcore exercise.

Think you’ve already beaten this year’s flu? Not so fast. While we are nearing the end of the season, the nasty bug can strike any time of year, note the researchers.

So for good measure, we’ve rounded up 10 of our favorite high intensity workouts. Try them out, and fight the flu and weight gain at the same time!

30-Minute Workout: Get Total-Body Toned with this No-Equipment Circuit Workout

This article was written by K. Aleisha Fetters and originally appeared on Womenshealthmag.com.

Whether you spoon or sleep back-to-back is an indicator of how happy and satisfied you and your partner are

According to a new study, spooning with your partner really does say something about your relationship.

Researchers from the University of Hertfordshire surveyed 1,000 people and found that couples who maintained physical contact while they slept were more likely to report being happy in their relationship. An overwhelming 94% of couples who touch while sleeping said they were happy, while only 68% of couples who didn’t touch while snoozing expressed being satisfied with their relationship.

Not only that, physical distance while sleeping seemed to translate into emotional distance. Of the 12% of couples who slept with less than an inch separation from their partner, 86% of them said they were happy. For couples who slept more than 30 inches apart (a mere 2%), only 66% said they were happy.

“This is the first survey to examine couples’ sleeping positions, and the results allow people to gain an insight into someone’s personality and relationship by simply asking them about their favorite sleeping position,” said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and study lead. The research was presented at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

The most popular sleeping position for couples was back to back, with 42% doing so. Thirty one percent slept facing the same direction, and 4% slept facing one another.

Interestingly, the more outgoing one is, the more likely that person is to sleep closer to to his or her partner. And creative types tended to sleep on their left.

So the next time you want to add some satisfaction to your relationship, consider scooting a little closer. You can always do the “Hug ‘n’ Roll” later.

[Science Daily]