The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently announced—without explanation—that it would not proceed with a proposal initiated by the Biden Administration to cover weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound for its beneficiaries. Medicare and Medicaid recipients can be reimbursed for the medications to treat diabetes, but currently the anti-obesity versions of these drugs will not be covered. As an obesity treatment, Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk, comes with a slightly higher dose for treating obesity than doses for diabetes; the medication is otherwise the same. For Zepbound, developed by Lilly, it's the same drug and administered in the same dose as Mounjaro, which is used to treat diabetes. Advertisement The Biden proposal would have included coverage of Wegovy and Zepbound to treat obesity under Medicare Part D for Medicare Advantage. “While today’s announcement was limited, we hope that with the confirmation of the new CMS director, the Trump Administration will move forward to finalize the definition of obesity. It is essential that CMS regulations are aligned with current medical science—and that means recognizing obesity as a serious chronic disease,” a spokesperson from Novo Nordisk said in a statement to TIME. A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement to TIME that the company “is disappointed in the MA-Part D rule because it is not the best reading of the statute and impacts patient access to obesity treatments,” referring to the program that allows enrollees to receive coverage of prescription drugs, including through private plans and through Medicare Advantage. “We will continue to work with the Trump Administration and Congressional leaders to ensure people living with obesity are covered by Medicare and Medicaid and are no longer left behind.”

Even before the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) eliminated 10,000 jobs on April 1, people who watched the agency closely were concerned about food safety. Under a Biden-era reorganization, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cut millions of dollars for state-level food inspections, effective this year. Inspections of facilities were not keeping up with Congressional directives; the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in Jan. 2025 urging the FDA to “strengthen inspection efforts to protect the U.S. food supply.” And advocates were concerned because major parts of the landmark 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act—including rules that farmers must monitor the water they spray on vegetables for manure—were being delayed or rolled back. Advertisement “We have always had a problem with having adequate funding and staffing for the level of complication that is food safety in the U.S.,” says Darin Detwiler, a food safety advocate whose toddler son died of E. coli poisoning in 1993 during an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants. This lack of funding has coincided with a number of food illness outbreaks in the U.S. in recent years—including, in 2024 alone, an E. coli outbreak linked to slivered onions at McDonald’s that killed one person, an E. coli outbreak linked to organic carrots sold in grocery stores (which also caused a fatality), and a listeria outbreak linked to Boar’s Head deli meat that resulted in 10 deaths. Then came the job cuts. At the FDA, 2,500 people were laid off, including workers in the Human Foods Program, who are tasked with ensuring food safety, and scientists at a product safety lab in San Francisco that tests foods for bacteria. Also gutted were communications staff at both FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who helped coordinate response to outbreaks and informed both consumers and businesses about recalled food. And hundreds of workers at CDC’s Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice lost their jobs; the organization coordinated government response to an outbreak of lead poisoning in 2023 linked to cinnamon applesauce pouches.

The White Lotus creators started planting seeds about Thailand’s deadly pong pong tree in the very first episode. “What am I supposed to do here all week without my phone?” a petulant Saxon asked hotel worker Pam. “Eat a bunch of fruit?” Even then, Pam’s response clearly foreshadowed future events: “We do have a lot of amazing fruit here, but I wouldn't eat that,” she responded. “That is the fruit of the mighty pong pong tree, and the seeds of the fruit are toxic.” Advertisement In the finale, Tim Ratliff tossed the pong pong seeds into the blender—and ended up accidentally poisoning Lochlan, who then recovered. But how realistic was the portrayal? We asked medical toxicologists what to know about the so-called "suicide tree"—and how Lochlan managed to survive.

It’s Sunday night, and you’re feeling sad and anxious about going back to work in the morning. Say hello to the Sunday scaries. You’re not alone in your workweek dread: “They’re very, very common,” says Susanne Cooperman, a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst at New York University Langone Huntington Medical Group. “There’s nothing wrong with a person if they feel sad that the weekend is over. It’s when it really interferes in your functioning—when you can’t focus, when you can’t sleep, when you feel yourself medicating with alcohol—then you need help.”

If you’ve ever spent time pondering what to do with that can of beans in your pantry, you’d be better off wondering what you can’t do. No matter what you’re cooking or baking, “the possibilities are endless,” says Maggie Michalczyk, a registered dietitian nutritionist in Chicago. You can add beans to almost anything. Beans are versatile, nutritious, and inexpensive, she says, making them an easy way to jumpstart your protein and fiber goals for the day. One cup of pinto beans, for example, has 18 grams of fiber and 14 grams of protein. Plus, they contain disease-fighting antioxidants, as well as essential nutrients like folate, iron, and potassium. Research suggests regularly eating beans can help prevent heart disease, reduce the risk of colorectal cancer and Type 2 diabetes, and improve gut health. Advertisement Michalczyk uses beans in both sweet and savory dishes. There are more than 400 kinds, which can be overwhelming, so if you’re just starting your legume journey, she advises zeroing in on a few before broadening your repertoire. Chickpeas, for example, “are kind of a blank-slate bean,” she says. “You can season them in lots of different ways.” Black beans are ideal for Mexican dishes and chili, while white beans take on the taste of whatever you add them to, making them a great addition to salads and soups. We asked bean enthusiasts to share their favorite—and most surprising—things to do with beans.

If your doctor told you that a vaccine against dementia was available, would you be interested? According to a study published April 2 in the journal Nature by researchers in the U.S. and Germany, this question might not be hypothetical anymore. The varicella-zoster virus—which causes varicella (chickenpox) in childhood and zoster (shingles) after lying dormant in nerve cells and re-activating later in life—is one virus that scientists have hypothesized can cause dementia, because it infects the nervous system. We have vaccines against both conditions. The chickenpox vaccine protects children from the initial viral infection, and the separate shingles vaccine prevents the virus from reactivating in previously infected adults (which is most adults born before widespread chickenpox vaccination began in the late 1990s), stopping it from causing the painful shingles rash. Advertisement The traditional way to find out if vaccinating adults against this virus could prevent dementia later in life would be to conduct a randomized controlled trial. We’d take a group of adults and randomly divide them into two groups: the “control” group that would get no vaccine, and the “intervention” group that would get the vaccine. Then, we’d look to see if there was a difference in rates of dementia between the two groups over time. The problem here is that because dementia is a disease of old age, we’d have to closely follow thousands of patients, collecting health information over many years—which is no simple task. The researchers behind this new study, including Markus Eyting and Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University, didn’t do any of this, though. They were clever enough to realize this experiment had already happened—purely by accident—yet its results remained a mystery waiting to be uncovered.

The Trump Administration is withholding millions of dollars allocated for family planning services from more than a dozen organizations. Enacted in 1970, the federal family planning program known as Title X makes millions of dollars available to clinics that provide health care services like birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing for people from low-income households. On March 31, Planned Parenthood—one of the largest Title X providers—said in a press release that nine of its affiliates received notices from the federal government that their Title X funding would be withheld starting April 1. Advertisement According to Planned Parenthood, more than three-quarters of its affiliates receive Title X funding, and in 2023, there were more than 1.5 million visits to Planned Parenthood health centers that received Title X funding. One of the nine affiliates affected is Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky (PPGNHAIK), which serves those four states as well as Idaho and western Washington. Its CEO, Rebecca Gibron, estimates that, as a result of the freeze, about $3 million a year will now be withheld from five of the six states PPGNHAIK serves: Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Alaska, and Hawaii. Gibron says that over half of PPGNHAIK’s health centers across six states serve more than 40,000 patients a year through Title X. “In our states, we are a safety net provider providing affordable birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and treatment,” Gibron says. “These patients rely on Title X for their health care, and without this program, patients may have no access to this care at all.” Planned Parenthood Action Fund President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said in a press release that if people aren’t able to access this care, cancers could go undetected, access to birth control could be reduced, and sexually transmitted infections could increase.

More than 150 House Democrats signed a letter sent to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on April 3, calling for the department to undo the freeze on millions of dollars allocated for family planning services. The letter, shared exclusively with TIME, comes after HHS confirmed this week that it is withholding Title X funds from 16 organizations “pending an evaluation of possible violations” of federal civil rights laws and President Donald Trump’s Executive Order declaring that undocumented immigrants are barred “from obtaining most taxpayer-funded benefits.” Title X is the nation’s only federally funded program dedicated solely to family planning, and each year allocates millions of dollars for clinics that provide birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and other health care services for people from low-income households. HHS did not respond to TIME’s questions earlier this week about the details of the “possible violations,” how much money was being withheld from the affected organizations, and which organizations were being hit by the funding freeze. It also did not respond to a further request for comment today, April 3. Advertisement More than $200 million is allocated for Title X annually. On March 25, the Wall Street Journal reported that HHS was considering freezing $27.5 million of those Title X funds. One of the largest Title X providers, Planned Parenthood, said on March 31 that nine of its affiliates were informed by the federal government that their Title X funding was being withheld as of April 1. Read More: Trump Administration Freezes Critical Title X Funding for 16 Organizations The letter sent to Kennedy on April 3 was an effort led by seven House Democrats: Rep. Judy Chu, California; Rep. Diana DeGette, Colorado; Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts; Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, New Mexico; Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, Texas; Rep. Sharice Davids, Kansas; and Rep. Nikema Williams, Georgia. The 162 House Democrats who signed it said in the letter that Title X has been “a cornerstone of safety-net care” for decades.

Employees of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) knew that mass layoffs would be coming on April 1. But many did not expect the cuts to be so deep—or the implications of the layoffs to be so potentially detrimental to the health and wellbeing of American families. The layoffs came in many formats: in emails at 5 a.m., in person when employees tried to swipe their badges at the workplace and found they were deactivated, in messages while they waited in line to try to get into their offices, according to current and former employees. Advertisement HHS first announced a “dramatic restructuring” on March 27 that would shrink HHS to 62,000 employees from 82,000, including about 10,000 layoffs and about 10,000 people who retired or resigned. In a press release, the department said that it would consolidate 28 divisions into 15 new divisions, calling the reorganization a “Transformation to Make America Healthy Again.” Included in the April 1 layoffs, according to current and former staff interviewed by TIME, were dozens of members of a division of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that oversees the safety of food, including administrative staff, project managers, HR, and communications staff. An entire division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that oversees the cleanliness of cruise ships was apparently let go, as were staff managing the CDC’s Freedom of Information Act requests. Staff for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps keep on utilities for struggling families, were eliminated. All regional administrators for the Administration for Community Living, which oversees programs supporting older adults and people with disabilities, were relieved of their duties. Staff of five of the 10 regional offices for the Administration for Children and Families—which oversees programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (commonly known as welfare)—were laid off.

You could spend the hours before a date obsessing over your hair, makeup, or outfit. Or you could channel that energy into brainstorming what to ask the stranger you’re splitting a basket of breadsticks with to figure out if you might want to eat dinner together forever. “There's so much disappointment in dating today, and one of my goals is to empower people to remember how much of their dating life is in their control,” says Damona Hoffman, a celebrity dating coach, host of the podcast Dates & Mates, and official love expert of The Drew Barrymore Show. “It’s really important that you express yourself clearly and get to know the person across from you, so you have the best chance of having that relationship continue or identifying if it's not a match.”