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More than one-third of adult Americans are obese. Diseases that kill the largest number of people annually, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and hypertension, can be attributed to diet.
When Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the first mercury thermometer, he called "zero degrees" the lowest temperature he was able to attain with a mixture of ice and salt. For the upper point of his scale, he used 96°, which he measured as normal human body temperature (we know it to be 98.6° today because of more accurate thermometers).
Bacteria have flourished on the earth for over three billion years. They were the first life forms on the planet.
Cancer has been around as long as humankind, but only in the second half of the twentieth century did the number of cancer cases explode.
In the United States, there is a birth every 8 seconds, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Clock.