Monday, June 18, 2012

10 Good Reasons Not To Exercise?


Exercise may actually be bad for you! A professor says he stumbled upon this "potentially explosive" insight. The New York Times has been quick to peddle it. And couch potatoes descend on it like vultures on road kill. But professors can get it wrong, too. 
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Thursday, June 14, 2012

Why You Should Arm Your Bullshit Alarm Before Reading Diet News.


In the fight over best diet for health and weight loss, it's protein lovers vs. vegetarian zealots. So far, a clear winner has not emerged. Only one loser: you, the victim of biased research. Here is an example of why you should keep your bullshit alarm on high alert when reading about weight loss diets.  
[tweet this].


Ellen M. Evans and colleagues wanted to know whether overweight men and women differ in their body composition responses to different weight loss diets [1]. So they enrolled 58 men and 72 women with a BMI greater than 26, and randomized them into two diet groups.
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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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