Posts Tagged ‘research’

Bet I know what you’ve been thinking about today.

Mmm hmm. And bet I know what you dreamed about last night.

Decadent fantasies … involving chocolate sauce … and whipped cream …

Huh? Oh, that’s all. Just decadent fantasies of chocolate sauce and whipped cream. People around the world may be talking sex with Sue Johanson, but they’re thinking about food. Constantly.

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Great. After surviving three cancer battles and several other life-and-death dramas, I just discovered I’m likely to succumb to Death by Sitting.

And I’m probably gonna have a lot of company.

Like many people, I’ve bonded with my computer. We spend our days and many evenings working and playing together. So of course, while we’re working, I’m sitting in a desk chair in my office. And if I’m working or playing on the laptop after hours, I’m often sitting in a recliner. Other times, I may be sitting in a car, library, theater, church, restaurant, stadium, waiting room, friend’s home, or on the dock of the bay.

But I make up for all that sitting by spending, oh, 30 minutes a day on the treadmill or hopping around on the Wii Fit. A couple of days a week, I do a little weight-lifting … a few chores around the house. So I’m active, right?

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In the film classic The Big Chill, a group of former college classmates try to understand why a member of their clique would end his life. One asks his new girlfriend if it’s true that he was unhappy. “I don’t know,” she answers. “I haven’t met that many happy people in my life, how do they act?”

Now, thanks to a new study dubbed “the first representative sample of planet Earth,” we know that regardless of gender, age, or cultural background, happy people act like they’re content with their … bank accounts?

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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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