"First, the expiration date, required by law in the United States, beginning in 1979, specifies only the date the manufacturer guarantees the full potency and safety of the drug -- it does not mean how long the drug is actually 'good' or safe to use.
    "Second, medical authorities uniformly say it is safe to take drugs past their expiration date -- no matter how 'expired' the drugs purportedly are. Except for possibly the rarest of exceptions, you won't get hurt and you certainly won't get killed. A contested example of a rare exception is a case of renal tubular damage purportedly caused by expired tetracycline (reported by G. W. Frimpter and colleagues in JAMA, 1963;184:111). This outcome (disputed by other scientists) was supposedly caused by a chemical transformation of the active ingredient.
    "Third, studies show that expired drugs may lose some of their potency over time, from as little as 5% or less to 50% or more (though usually much less than the latter). Even 10 years after the 'expiration date,' most drugs have a good deal of their original potency. So wisdom dictates that if your life does depend on an expired drug, and you must have 100% or so of its original strength, you should probably toss it and get a refill, in accordance with the cliche, 'better safe than sorry.' If your life does not depend on an expired drug -- such as that for headache, hay fever, or menstrual cramps -- take it and see what happens."

"'Manufacturers put expiration dates on for marketing, rather than scientific, reasons,'" said Mr. Flaherty, a pharmacist at the FDA until his retirement in 1999. "'It's not profitable for them to have products on a shelf for 10 years. They want turnover.'"

"All other factors being equal, each extra degree of sprawl meant extra weight, less walking and a little more high blood pressure, he [Reid Ewing, Rutgers University urban planner] concluded. Someone living in the most sprawling county - Geauga County outside Cleveland - would weigh 6.3 pounds more than if that same person lived in the most compact area, Manhattan."

"In the 25 most compact counties, 22.8 percent of adults had high blood pressure and 19.2 percent were obese. In the 25 most sprawling counties, those rates were 25.3 percent and 21.2 percent, respectively."