Category: Health

People with better memories are not necessarily better at remembering things.  This study shows they are better at ignoring the unimportant things.  They filter better so they only have to try to remember the important things.

That makes me feel better.  All those things I can’t remember?  They weren’t important.

Boing Boing: Better visual working memory stems from ignoring stuff.

You are more likely to get a cold when you’re cold, especially if your nose is cold.

BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | Mothers ‘were right’ over colds.

I just read a very interesting article by Seth Roberts, "What Makes Food Fattening.  (The Freakonmics blog pointed me to it.)  Nobody knows what makes food fattening but Roberts had a lot of interesting theories.  The article was well worth reading but if you don’t have the time to read all 77 pages, here’s my summary.  (Note that all the figures were at the end of the article.)  I’m going to state these as facts but the paper makes it very clear that they are all still theories.

• We have body fat "set point", a level of fat or weight that our body tries to maintain.
• This set point is variable and depends on what we eat.
• Food has a flavor and an amount of calories.  The higher the amount of calories, the better the flavor will taste.  This is flavor-calorie association.  So if a banana had 200 calories, it would taste better than bananas do now with only 100 calories even though the banana flavor is the same.
• The faster your body notices the calories, the higher this flavor-calorie association is.  So if it’s flavored sugar water, it reaches your digestive stream quickly and it’ll have a higher flavor-calorie association than food that needs to be broken down and processed by your stomach.
• Foods can be paired together and have a joint flavor-calorie association.  French fries don’t have much flavor, so their flavor-calorie association would be low, but when we eat them with high flavor foods (like hamburgers), the hamburger/french fry flavor-calorie association is high with hamburgers contributing to the flavor and french fries (and hamburgers) to the calorie part.
• The more flavor-calorie foods you eat, the higher your fat set point is.  This has something to do with when foods are plenty, food is more diverse and flavor-calorie associations go up.  When food is scarse, they go down and our fat set points go down.
• Japanese are thinner because their food has less flavor and so the flavor-calorie association is weaker.
• Fast food has a very strong flavor-calorie association and it’s very consistent.
• The more consistent a food, the more likely you will develop a flavor-calorie association with it.

His advice?

• Eat new foods often!  Your body doesn’t have a flavor-calorie association for it.
• Vary food flavors often.  If you cook at home, make your dishes just a little different each time.
• Consume calories with no flavor.  This will decrease your set point.  (Roberts claims drinking fructose water between meals will actually decrease your set point and cause you to lose weight.)

I’m not sure what I think about it all yet, but it’s a lot of food for thought.

2:36pm: I forgot one:

• Eating the same food all the time makes it boring and lowers the flavor-calorie association.  All liquid diets are boring and so people eat less of them.

 

Surveys show that dieters that keep a food journal lose more weight and keep it off.  Now a new service allows you to take pictures of your food and somebody else figures out how to journal it: MyFoodPhone.  At a $100/month, it’s not cheap.  You do get personal advise from a dietitian though.

Gay men react to sexual orders more like women do than straight men do.  Whether their response is a cause or an effect of being gay is still unknown.

Gay and Straight Men React Differently to Sexual Odors – New York Times.

Rich people are fat now too. Obesity surges among affluent – Yahoo! News.

Several of my friends are either pregnant or have just had a baby, so the topic of episiotomies has come up a few times.  Episiotomies are not a good thing for women – they might make it easier for the doctor and they might be better for the baby in a few cases, but they are not good for women.  There is scientific proof to back this up and we’ve known this for years, but most people still think they are a good thing.  In case you are one of those people, here’s a link to the latest study showing that episotomies are not necessarily a good thing and they are not better for women than tearing:  Review: Episiotomies May Bring More Risks – Yahoo! News.

In case you missed the previous gazillion studies, here’s yet another one, Fast Food Linked to Obesity, Diabetes. The real question is what are we going to do about it?

Once again, researchers are saying that if you don’t get enough sleep, you are more likely to be obese.  In this study, people who got 6 hours of sleep a night were 23% more likely to be obese than those who got the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep a night.  For those that only get 4 hours of sleep a night, the chances of being obese go up 73%! 

Study Links Sleep Deprivation, Obesity

So get your sleep!

Personally, I don’t think an American citizen should have to be employed by a company in order to get good health insurance. But at the moment, that’s the way the system works. And I believe we give adequate tax benefits and incentives to large companies so that they are able to provide good health insurance options to their employees. Many large companies in the US do offer good health insurance options to employees.

Walmart not only pays dismally, but it is also rather stingy on the health insurance. From

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