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Cities, hotels and community centers will offer family-friendly activities—whether Tai Chi classes or junior chef challenges.

A must-watch global wellness issue: the continued march of sugar taxes. The UK sugar tax came into effect last Friday (April 6). It will be levied on manufacturers of soft drinks: those that contain 5 grams of sugar per 100 ml will pay 18p a litre as a opposed to 24p a litre for those that have more than 8 grams of sugar per 100 ml.

The GWI’s Digital Wellness Initiative just released a new research paper: Wellness in the Age of the Smartphone. The authors, leaders from medicine, hospitality, economics and technology, examine the mounting research on how technology is negatively impacting sleep, obesity, mental health, relationships, safety and productivity. Smartphones may only be a decade old, but their increasingly profound impact on human life and culture, they argue, needs to be a greater research and policy focus. They suggest ways forward…

With the launch of the GWI’s Wellness Moonshot: A World Free of Preventable Disease, and in light of World Health Day on April 7, Skin. Inc. magazine tapped the GWI and their medical partner, Richard Carmona, M.D., 17th Surgeon General of the United States, for concrete ways that people can challenge themselves to make a difference in world heath – from “think women” to “be social.”

Japan’s snow monkeys are famed for soaking in natural hot springs. And a new study from Kyoto University shows that the monkeys’ stress hormones declined significantly when they were bathing. There appears to be evidence of not just physical – but social – value of thermal bathing for these macaques: the higher-ranking monkeys spent more time in the pools.