Food Just Got a Lot More Complicated – Which Is a Good Thing Food changes gene expression – directly. Eat a bowl of rice and you can turn off genes controlling cholesterol synthesis. Right out of the pot. You’ve been eating genetic information – probably all your life. The data come from China, from Lin […]
Can you cut your cancer risk by half? (12/12/11)
Health Versus Health Care America’s health care budget is 2.6 trillion dollars. On its own it would rank as the fifth largest economy in the world. We’re 49th in overall mortality. How much of this vast spending goes to health prevention? A pittance. Not enough people make money on preventing illness, though plenty make money […]
Weight, learning and sleep – it’s all connected (11/14/11)
Less Sleep, More Weight – and Worse Learning Connections count. A few years ago people had a hard time believing that sleep time determined weight. Though physicians have long recognized that increased weight means increased sleep apnea, most of the population does not recognize that being overweight itself interferes with sleep and increases inflammation. […]
Sleeping Beauty (10/26/11)
Is Sleep the Secret to Looking Good? Why sleep? people ask me. I give them a welter reasons starting with avoidance of death. Sleep deprive any animal and it dies – rather quickly. Yet fear of death does not seem to motivate people to take more time for rest, or to even pay attention to […]
Can marriage make you fat? (9/21/11)
A Risk of Commitment? So is marriage another risk factor for making you fat? The data from this year’s American Sociological Association Meeting are troubling, though not surprising. Studying over 10,000 men and women as part of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ’79, weight gain was common among both men and women in the 2 […]