The Differences Between Food and Medicine Can foods be drugs and drugs foods? A popular definition of food might include these elements: Nourishment Taste Fuel Energy Materials Appetite Similarly, a popular definition of drug might include issues of: Medical Treatment Decreasing Symptoms Changing Risk Factors of Illness These different arenas sound pretty separable – yet […]
Use the news – don’t be used by it (4/22/11)
Fascination or Entertainment? You can’t stop watching. Night and day your head and eyes turn to the screen. The images flow like waking dreams. Walls of water lift up Japanese houses and schools like paper toys. Hundreds of thousands in Tahrir Square shout the end of dictatorship, chanting, singing, then cleaning the street refuse of […]
Depression and insomnia – what causes what? (4/18/11)
Is Depression Making Me Sleepless, Or Is Insomnia Making Me Depressed? Depression and insomnia are common and possess common symptoms. Some estimate that 30% of Americans will eventually experience clinical depression, and perhaps 40% of adults complain that many or most nights they don’t get enough sleep, wake too often, or feel unrested on awakening. […]
Florida does it again – voting to ban children from playing outside (4/06/11)
Keep Them In Tim Dorsey and Carl Hiaasen, move over – Florida reality again trumps both fantasy and novelistic legerdemain. Perhaps it’s the effect of earthquakes and oil spills (our one year anniversary of the BP disaster) but strangeness pervades the state. Some weeks ago five teenagers in Silver Springs Shore snorted the remains of […]
Does sleep loss give me the munchies, or do I just get high? (4/1/11)
How to Gain Weight Without Even Trying Sleep less, weigh more. Even if might feel temporarily high from staying up all night, keep staying up and you’re going to put on weight. Quickly. Columbia University researchers rigidly controlled the life of 13 men and 13 women for six days. One group slept 8 hours, the […]