Monday, June 11, 2012

Can Chocolate Save You From Heart Attack?


The media says yes. Science says maybe. In the end, you decide. Here are the facts:


A truffle treatment for heart disease is imminent. That's what a recent article suggests, headlined in the New York Daily News as: "Dark chocolate cuts heart deaths; Study shows benefits for high risk cardiac patients." 

The funny thing is, the cited  study does not show what the media geniuses claim it does. So, let's look at this master piece of research journalism and ...
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Thursday, June 7, 2012

Can A Genetic Test Say Why You Are Fat?

With the decoding of the human genome came the hope of getting a lever on the chronic diseases, which kill most of us today: heart disease, stroke, diabetes and many cancers. And since overweight and obesity are a common cause of those diseases, many obese people were, and still are, yearning for that exculpatory headline: "It's all in your genes!" Why and how this headline is unlikely to ever appear in any serious media, was a subject of my earlier post "It's not your genes, stupid!".

Now, a group of researchers have looked at the data of a 30-year investigation of health and behavior, ...
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Monday, June 4, 2012

No Time To Exercise? You Are Not Alone!

Lack of time is the most often cited excuse for not exercising. I deliberately chose the word "excuse" over its less judgmental alternative "obstacle". Simply because I cannot see an "obstacle" when I compare two simple metrics: the hours people spend watching TV and the minutes needed to maintain one's health with exercise. With high intensity interval training, or HIT, health enhancing exercise can be compressed into an amazingly short amount of time. When done right. [tweet this].
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Thursday, May 31, 2012

How to Live Longer And Exercise Shorter?

Let's face it, if exercise was really that much fun, everybody would do it and we wouldn't be fat, diabetic or die of heart disease. So when your doctor tells you that you better start exercising, your immediate question might be: how much do I have to do? The answer is, it depends. It depends on whether you want to hear the polite version or the truth.  [tweet this].


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Monday, May 28, 2012

3 Ways to Spot Their Lies About Healthy Recipes

Briefly: If I had to name the one word, that is most often used to label something as what it is not, my vote would go to "healthy". Whether it's the issue of sugar vs. honey, of butter vs. oil or of calories vs. nutrients, science and evidence are clearly not playing the lead role in the culinary theater of the world wide web. Judging by its popularity, that's a missed opportunity.
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