The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

I lost a friend about a year ago. Or at least, I thought I did.

Last month she came back. It turned out she and her husband were going through a terrible time when she faded away: he'd been diagnosed with a chronic disease and had to go on disability; they were on the brink of losing their house; they pulled their son out of college because they couldn't pay the bills. She told me all this over coffee but assured me that the situation has since righted itself. Her husband is working, they renegotiated their mortgage. The kid is back in school.

So it's not just your imagination, it actually is true. Those zero-calorie sodas people are popping left and right and up and down, ordering with their cheeseburgers and large fries and drinking instead of coffee in the morning or wine at night, actually lead to (or, as they say in medical-speak, "are linked to") metabolic syndrome, which is a fancy way of saying fat and all its attendant ills.