Health & WellnessS


Family

Study: Paying Cash, Not Credit, Leads to Healthier Food Choices

supermarket
© Noel Hendrickson/Getty
Paying with cash instead of plastic at the grocery store leads to more careful spending and healthier food choices, a study in the Journal of Consumer Research finds.

The idea is that shelling out actual money is psychologically more difficult than swiping a credit card, which takes away from the joy of spending.

Researchers followed the grocery shopping habits of 1,000 households over six months, tracking what they bought and how they paid for it.

"The notion that mode of payment can curb impulsive purchase of unhealthy food products is substantially important," wrote authors, Manoj Thomas, Kalpesh Kaushik Desai and Satheeshkumar Seenivasan. "The epidemic increase in obesity suggests that regulating impulsive purchases and consumption of unhealthy food products is a steep challenge for many consumers."

Heart

The 'Mommy Brain' Is Bigger: How Love Grows a New Mother's Brain

mother and child
© Unknown
Take heart, new moms: you may be feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and distracted, but your brain is actually growing. Especially if you're the kind of mom who's been driving your friends and family mad by talking about how perfect, special and beautiful your new child is.

Despite the fact that the term "mommy brain" typically describes mindless behavior - like putting the milk away in the closet and your hat in the fridge - a new study published in Behavioral Neuroscience finds that women's brains may actually get bigger during new motherhood. The study's authors took brain scans of 19 moms two to four weeks after birth and again two to four months later, and found that their brains showed growth in midbrain regions involved with the experience of pleasure and in the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to reasoning, planning and judgment.

New mothers who seemed to take more pleasure and joy in their role as parent - selecting from a list of adjectives more positive words like "ideal" to describe their infants, and words such as "proud" and "blessed" to describe their experience of parenthood - saw greater growth in their emotion-processing regions.

Cheeseburger

Some Africans, Poor No More, Hit by New Diseases

Johannesburg - The medical experts gathered from around Africa were here to talk about a continentwide epidemic, but it wasn't AIDS or malaria - it was diabetes, and the bad habits that often bring it on.

A growing urban middle class is defying the image of Africa as poor, underfed and under-medicated. And with the comforts of middle class life, afflictions familiar in the West are making inroads here too - obesity, diabetes, lung cancer, strokes, heart disease.

A continent that traditionally traveled on foot or by bicycle now increasingly rides cars and buses. More time is spent at desks. Elevators are replacing stairs. White-collar Africans are discovering the gym.

Health

This Cooking Oil is a Powerful Virus-Destroyer and Antibiotic...

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© b4tea.com
You've no doubt noticed that for about the last 60 years the majority of health care officials and the media have been telling you saturated fats are bad for your health and lead to a host of negative consequences, like elevated cholesterol, obesity, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Meanwhile during this same 60 years the American levels of heart disease, obesity, elevated serum cholesterol and Alzheimer's have skyrocketed compared to our ancestors, and even compared to modern-day primitive societies using saturated fat as a dietary staple.

Did you know that multiple studies on Pacific Island populations who get 30-60% of their total caloric intact from fully saturated coconut oil have all shown nearly non-existent rates of cardiovascular disease?[1]

Clearly, a lot of confusion and contradictory evidence exists on the subject of saturated fats, even among health care professionals.

But I'm going to tell you something that public health officials and the media aren't telling you.

The fact is, all saturated fats are not created equal.

The operative word here is "created", because some saturated fats occur naturally, while other fats are artificially manipulated into a saturated state through the man-made process called hydrogenation.

Hydrogenation manipulates vegetable and seed oils by adding hydrogen atoms while heating the oil, producing a rancid, thickened oil that really only benefits processed food shelf life and corporate profits.

The medical and scientific communities are now fairly united in the opinion that hydrogenated vegetable and seed oils should be avoided.

Info

Falling in love 'more scientific than you think'

A new meta-analysis study, "The Neuroimaging of Love," conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue, reveals that falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second.

Ortigue is an assistant professor of psychology and an adjunct assistant professor of neurology, both in The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University.

Results from Ortigue's team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.

The findings beg the question, "Does the heart fall in love, or the brain?"

Cell Phone

DECT Cordless Phones (and WiFi) Causes Heart Irregularities

DECT Cordless phones (Digital Enhanced Cordless Technology) which transmit a pulsed signal have been shown to impact heart rate in new research published in the European Journal of Oncology.

The double-blind, peer reviewed provocation study of 25 people validates the condition complained of by increasing numbers of people across the globe today called 'electrosensitivity' (ES or EHS), demonstrating immediate effects on heart rate, almost doubling the heart rate in some cases. The study was led by Prof. Magda Havas of Trent University, Canada.

"What we found is what many people have said for a long time about devices that emit microwaves," stated Dr. Havas. "People don't just feel ill, their heart begins to race and this is measurable with medical heart monitoring devices."

Syringe

1 in 3 Americans Will Have Diabetes by 2050, CDC Says

In the United States, 1 in 3 people will have Type 2 diabetes by 2050 if current trends continue, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The projections, released today (Oct. 22), are alarming to U.S. health officials, who say the numbers highlight the need for interventions to keep the number of new cases from climbing.

Currently, 1 in 10 Americans has Type 2 diabetes. But if new cases develop as projected, its prevalence could double or triple over the next 40 years, said Ann Albright, director of the Division of Diabetes Translation at the CDC.

"We can't have that, it's unsustainable," Albright told MyHealthNewsDaily.

Cheeseburger

Best of the Web: Global Warming Fraudsters Now Say 'Go Veggie' To Save Planet

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© Unknown
Wholesale changes to the nation's diet, with a move towards vegetarian food and away from beef and cheese, have been recommended by Government advisers.

A report commissioned by the Food Standards Agency suggests radical changes to what we eat and even how we cook.

These include eating more seasonal produce to reduce transportation and switching to microwave ovens and pressure cookers to use less energy in preparing food.

Out would go beef, cheese, sugary foods and drinks such as tea, coffee and cocoa. In would come vegetables and pulses, together with yoghurt.

The FSA says the switch is necessary as part of a move to a diet that is low in greenhouse gases (GHG), which are associated with climate change.

The report, compiled by a team from the University of East Anglia, suggests that schools, hospitals and other public bodies should be expected to lead a change in national behaviour by putting low-GHG food on their menus.

The university was at the centre of allegations last year that it had manipulated climate change data to magnify the problem.

Comment: So we're expected to believe a climate report from a University department accused of cooking climate data?


Magnify

Younger Brains Are Easier to Rewire - Brain Regions Can Switch Functions

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© iStockphoto/Vasiliy YakobchukScientists offer evidence that it is easier to rewire the brain early in life. Researchers found that a small part of the brain's visual cortex that processes motion became reorganized only in the brains of subjects who had been born blind, not those who became blind later in life.
A new paper from MIT neuroscientists, in collaboration with Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, offers evidence that it is easier to rewire the brain early in life. The researchers found that a small part of the brain's visual cortex that processes motion became reorganized only in the brains of subjects who had been born blind, not those who became blind later in life.

The new findings, described in the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Current Biology, shed light on how the brain wires itself during the first few years of life, and could help scientists understand how to optimize the brain's ability to be rewired later in life. That could become increasingly important as medical advances make it possible for congenitally blind people to have their sight restored, said MIT postdoctoral associate Marina Bedny, lead author of the paper.

In the 1950s and '60s, scientists began to think that certain brain functions develop normally only if an individual is exposed to relevant information, such as language or visual information, within a specific time period early in life. After that, they theorized, the brain loses the ability to change in response to new input.

Animal studies supported this theory. For example, cats blindfolded during the first months of life are unable to see normally after the blindfolds are removed. Similar periods of blindfolding in adulthood have no effect on vision.

Bug

How Bedbugs Invaded New York

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© Guardian Imaging/Getty ImagesSleepless in Manhattan...bedbugs are on the march across New York City.
New York City is under attack from a mass infestation of bedbugs that is leaving a trail of itching, sleep deprivation and panic in its wake.

Since the early days of moving pictures, a favourite staple of Hollywood has been to imagine New York city being invaded by nasty creatures that hide in dark corners. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, one of the first monster films, starred a dinosaur that emerges from hibernation to crunch its way up Fifth Avenue, spreading mayhem in its wake. Then, of course, there was King Kong perched atop the Empire State Building. More recently, the zombies roaming Washington Square in search of Will Smith in I Am Legend were classics of the form, as was the aliens who lopped off the head of Lady Liberty in Cloverfield.

Having been raised on all these celluloid enactments of non-human invasion, you would have thought that New Yorkers would be pretty unfazed when the real thing happens. But, judging by the increasingly hysterical headlines that have been blasted across the pages of the New York Post in the last few weeks, that's not the case.

For the truth is that the city really is under attack this time, and its residents are starting to panic.