Thankfully, a major level-up in the cooking department doesn’t require a complete kitchen overhaul. In fact, for many at-home cooks, a food processor is a one-appliance upgrade that takes your meals to new brag-worthy heights and cuts down on time spent on the more mundane kitchen tasks like chopping, mincing, slicing, and cleaning. Up to a certain point, a high-powered blender like a Vitamix is all you need, In addition to blending, it can grind, coarse-chop, and mix in a pinch....

“While it can maybe help people fall asleep, it disturbs sleep—especially in the second part of the night. It’s not an effective sleep aid to turn to,” Fiona Baker, Ph.D., the director of the Human Sleep Research Program at SRI International, says of alcohol. That’s because as alcohol gets metabolized in the night, it disrupts essential deep sleep stages like REM sleep1. Baker adds that it can also increase body temperature and heart rate, contribute to inadequate hydration, and lead us to need to use the bathroom—all things that will further disrupt sleep quality....

Your moon sign (which you can calculate here) is determined by the position of the moon in the sky at the moment of your birth, and it speaks to your emotions, intuition, and inner world. And what’s more romantic than a couple who understands the deeper layers of each other’s psyche? It speaks to your personal, unseen world—your subconscious. And it has everything to do with your emotional needs. As mbg’s resident astrologists the AstroTwins explain, “Your moon rules your emotions, your responses, even what you’re drawn to sometimes....

Research on precrastination1 confirms the drawbacks of being the proverbial early bird: Back in 2014, psychologist David Rosenbaum, Ph.D., and his colleagues had college students carry one of a pair of buckets to the end of a walkway, asking them to choose whichever bucket seemed easier. Instead of choosing the bucket closer to the end, most of them chose the one closer to the starting point. That meant they carried the bucket for a longer distance, when it would’ve been easier to complete the task by waiting to grab the bucket closer to the end....

And while climaxing isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of fulfilling sex, orgasms should ultimately be pleasurable, not painful. Unless ruined orgasms are your thing, painful sex is generally not considered normal. In fact, it could be a signal from your body that there’s an underlying condition or pelvic floor issue—one that you should definitely get checked out. To understand the mechanisms here, it’s helpful to clarify what an orgasm is at its core: a neurophysiological culmination ending with an involuntary muscle spasm....

Pea protein can be found in a variety of products, from protein powders to veggie burgers to milk. Depending on how it is processed, pea protein can be produced in one of three forms2: isolates, which have the highest protein concentration; concentrates, which have a slightly lower protein concentration and may contain some fat and carbohydrates; and textured, which can be used in meat substitutes. When sold as a protein powder, in the isolate form, pea protein typically has around 25 grams of protein per 100-calorie serving....

While eating vegetables themselves paves the way for a healthier diet, traditional Ayurvedic medicine states that eating raw vegetables might be hard to digest for some. Here’s why. Beyond nutrition, however, raw vegetables can simply be hard to digest2. Anybody with irritable bowel syndrome knows this. You can chew and chew, but cold, raw food can upset the digestion, especially when it already isn’t working at optimum capacity. If you love salad for lunch, you don’t necessarily have to give it up altogether....