Posts Tagged ‘information’

Did you know every hour you spend driving knocks 20 minutes off your life expectancy because of the increased risk of being involved in a fatal collision?

Neither did I.

Before the price of gasoline went sky high, I used to drive around just for the heck of it. Stress release. Sometimes I’d drive for a couple of hours. Taken in context with that statistic, now it sounds like I was ingesting slow poison.

Yikes.

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Great news for the millions of people who find it excruciatingly awkward to stand in front of a mirror and say things like:

I’m a wonderful person.

The world loves me.

I deserve good things.

I am lovable.

What’s the good news? You can stop the embarrassing love affair with yourself.

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We’re creatures of excess. As soon as we find out something is good for us, we seem to take it to extremes. Several years ago, researchers decided people were eating too much fat. So manufacturers started to produce a lot of fat-free products. But to make up for the missing fat, they added a lot more sugar. And no one seemed to get thinner.

You wouldn’t think you could get too carried away about something as healthy as positive thinking. But some people do. They get so carried away with the importance of positive thinking that they begin to blame themselves and others anytime something bad happens to them. Obviously, if something bad has happened, it’s because someone had a rogue negative thought.

Well … poppycock!

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Health issues prove mountainous for many people around the world, and the quality and availability of health care varies from culture to culture. In the United States and some other modern industrialized nations, it’s become common for many patients to combine Western medicine with alternative, herbal, and traditional practices and remedies. The problem: Not all combinations prove to be healthy blends.

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Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Scratch that. Are you as smart as a preschooler?

What’s the one thing most preschoolers do that may give them an intellectual boost? They take long afternoon naps.

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Feeling alone in the world? Maybe you should spend more time online.

Sound crazy? That’s what I thought. But it looks as though our gadgets may not be as isolating as previously thought. According to the Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, modern technology actually may help us broaden our social circles.

Although a 2006 study argued that in the last two decades, people have become more socially isolated, the Pew study found that people who reach out through cell phones and the Internet have larger and more diverse social networks than those who don’t.

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The good thing about growing up in the American South is we learn early to love our vegetables. The bad thing is we learn to love them in the worst possible way. Our favorite veggie dishes include fried squash, fried okra, fried green tomatoes, asparagus or broccoli drenched in cheese, and anything swimming in butter. By the time we Southerners finish tinkering with our veggies, they have nearly as many calories as any of our signature desserts. And they taste just as decadent.

Once you’ve learned to love a mushy, butter-slathered veggie, it’s mighty tough to like it any other way. So when I’m trying to eat healthy, I have to fight the temptation to skip veggies altogether. One way I do that is by eating a lot of salads with light spray-mist dressings.

But just as I have to guard against butter and cheese contaminating my veggies, now I find I have to take extra precautions against winding up with unwanted bacteria in my salad.

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In grade school, my favorite place on campus was the library. Ours was an old school, and the library was small with dark wood floors, tables, chairs, and shelves. To this day, the lemony scent of certain wood-care products makes me feel a wonderful sense of nostalgia as I’m taken back to that old library and the adventures I found in the books it housed.

We all know smells can remind us of people, places, and events from our pasts. But recently Israeli researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science began studying how the link between odor and memory might be used to help treat trauma patients.

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It might surprise Americans to learn one of the qualities that make them stand out among people of other nations is their shiny white teeth. But as health care in the United States becomes more expensive and fewer people are able to afford dental insurance, Americans need to take precautions to ensure their pearly whites don’t lose their luster.

The American Dental Association recommends children begin visiting the dentist before their first birthday. And the best way to get children to visit the dentist is to lead by example. A recent National Health Interview Study of children age 2 to 17 found that those whose parents visited the dentist were more likely to have seen a dentist as well.

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Feeling blue? You’re not alone. Major depression has been cited as the fourth most disabling condition in the world and the second most disabling in the west.

But by exploring other colors in the spectrum, you may be able to ward off the blues before they become crippling.

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