The health insurance companies know exactly how you should practice. These days, despite the admonitions of Nancy Reagen, they are pointedly telling you to use drugs – and quite peeved when you don’t. A recent postal arrival from a major insurer arrived on properly forbidding stationery. The declaration – it was incumbent that I put patient […]
Flus and Infections – How Viruses Time Their Attacks
Timing Your Health As the Romans wrote, time rules life – especially our biological inner life. Body clocks influence or directly control large segments of human physiology and performance. So recent work by researchers at Cambridge’s MRC Research Unit, demonstrating that viruses as varied as herpes and influenza A infect at ten times the rate […]
Could Reading Books Be Key To Living Long?
Books for Long Life Can reading books provide you a longer life? Is reading itself a key to better survival? A recent study from Yale argues that the active reading of books (more so than periodicals, sorry,) may give you a better chance to continue reading for a long, long time. The research went back to […]
The Costs of Sitting
How much does sitting cost mankind’s health? According to several new papers in the Lancet, at least $67 billion a year. About $54 billion of that represents direct medical costs. And that does not include the costs of early death. Can one million people really be wrong? The results, pooling 16 studies of those million […]
Is Your Brain Like a Muscle?
Grow your muscle, grow your brain. For decades it’s getting clearer – physical activity leads to more brain cells. But how? And why? A recent paper in Cell Metabolism, ably reported by Gretchen Reynolds, shows the advantages of cross-species research. Work with mice, monkeys and humans demonstrated something jocks sensed long ago – your legs talk […]