Fitness Pudding - Where The Proof Is

A recent study on hair growth needed to make a silicone container or chip. An epoxy mold was surrounded with a silicone polymer called poly-dimethyl-siloxane. This chip was then covered in culture of hair follicles germs, and implanted on the back of a nude mouse. As a result, there was hair growth. Clearly then, McDonald’s french fries cure baldness, right? No. The study found that hair growth on the mice was from hair follicle germs, and...

  A social contagion is a process where the network in which people are embedded, influence their behaviors.  The idea of obesity being socially contagious is not new. 1,2,4 The idea is this: If you live around people who have healthy behaviors, you might be influenced to have healthy behaviors. However, if you live around people with unhealthy behaviors, you might follow suit - thus increasing your risk of obesity. It has been shown, for example,...

A recent study 1 looked at this exact question. Participants used smart phones to scan food barcodes for 4 weeks. The nutrition labels were then displayed for all the products they scanned. They found that the products for which participants viewed the label, and subsequently purchased were about 13% healthier than the products where the labels were viewed, but were not purchased. The authors conclude that, "nutrition labels may influence healthier food purchases by those consumers...

  I was growing tired of the same ‘ol, boring oral ingestion of my coffee. At the same time, I was made aware of the growing popularity of coffee enemas, which now had celebrity endorsement, and could done at home with the “Implant O-rama” – which sounded like something a clown doctor would use. So, I needed to first confirm the benefits of the coffee enema.  The local barista was no help, so I perused the...

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  Babies suck.  Let me explain. Infants have a natural reflex for what is called nonnutritive sucking (NNS), such as sucking on their thumb or a pacifier. They do not get any nutrition from this sucking, as they would with breastfeeding, thus “nonnutritive.” We also see occasional nonnutritive sucking from my favorite sports teams. But, I digress.  Due to the rise in the number of obese children, and that breastfeeding can be associated with a reduced...

 “How would you describe your usual walking pace?” Slow Pace Average, Steady Pace Brisk Pace If you are like the nearly 421,000 middle-aged adults who were asked this question, it can tell you about your risk of dying from cancer or cardiovascular disease. 2 Here was the percentage of women dying from anything (or all-cause), cancer or cardiovascular disease the following 6 years after answering this question. Walking Pace All-Cause Cancer CVD Slow 3.4% 1.5% 0.7%...

A recent study confirmed that eating a piece of birthday cake that someone has just blown their spit and gooey germs all over, is gross. The scientists' specific objective was to “evaluate the level of bacterial transfer transferred to the top of a cake when blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.” 1   What they Did A foil circle was placed on a styrofoam disk. Vanilla icing was spread on top, and adorned with...

I went back and forth on whether or not to cover this one, but it kept bouncing back up.  In short, ping pong (or table tennis) is being promoted as a weight loss tactic. What We Already Know The Compendium of Physical Activities has table tennis listed as a 4.0 MET activity. "MET" stands for the metabolic equivalent of a task, and represents the amount of energy required for a particular test. 1 MET is the...

Bone Fat? Spot losing fat has been busted, but recommendations still persist that we can beat everything from belly fat to back fat with exercise. Now, we can possibly beat bone fat with exercise? Wait, our bones can be fat? We have already seen that our tongues can be fat, so maybe bone fat is a possibility. At first glance, it might appear that too much bone fat is related to the “big bone” myth, but...