Well, duh! Who can forget that Meg Ryan scene in “When Harry Met Sally”?
Category: The Body Electric
The hive mind
HSP
So my shrink thinks I may be one of these. Sounds about right, except I’m one of the extrovert types. (But not all the time.)
Diet soda
61 percent increased risk of stroke.
Oh, and fountain sodas? E. coli. Just sayin’!
Conventional wisdom
This is exactly the question I would have asked if I’d been in this position: “If I’m getting chemo and radiation, why are you taking out the lymph nodes?”
My guess is, a lot of women did ask that question. And the surgeons told them to stop that crazy talk and just let the doctors do their job.
Skin cell gun
This is pretty amazing — treating burns by spraying stem calls on the skin.
Does football have a future?
Organic
I started drinking organic milk years ago, after I saw “The Corporation”. It showed how regular dairies keeps cows in a constant state of infection to produce more milk, and how much pus there was in the milk. Yuck!
According to an important new study, organic milk sold in England delivers significantly higher levels of healthy fatty acids than does conventional milk. The study, funded by the European Union and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Dairy Science, can be accessed for free here.
The researchers compared fat composition and protein content of 10 organic and 12 conventional brands found on supermarket shelves in northeast England. Researchers found that the organic milk had only slightly higher overall fat content, but much higher levels of what it calls “beneficial fatty acids.”
The differences are significant in public-health terms. In America and Great Britain alike, people on average don’t get enough essential fatty acids. For example, one of the fatty acids in question, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), has been shown to lower heart disease and cancer risks, the researchers say. The meat and milk of ruminant animals are “almost our exclusive source of dietary CLA,” the researchers support — and organic milk has significantly more of it. By switching to organic milk, the U.K. public could increase its average CLA intake by as much as 40 percent, the authors reckon.
R.I.P.
Meditation
Maybe I need to get me some of that meditation mindfulness thing:
Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s grey matter.
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study’s senior author. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”