Adam Elliott's blog

Some of the friendly advice from my mother, who said "if it's not one thing, it's another."

I guess that holds true for some new research that says if we follow the new US Government guidelines, it will cost the average person at least $7.28 a week extra.  The recent report said we should be eating more postassium, dietary fiber, Vitamin D and calcium.

The study found introducing more potassium in a diet is likely to add $380 per year to the average consumer's food costs.

This conversely means that it's become more affordable to eat junk food!  This can't be right.

I don't think they took into consideration the dangers of flipping out of a hammock, but this was an curious study.

A team of Swiss and French scientists published a study on Monday that suggests the rocking motion of a hammock improves sleep quality and helps people get to sleep faster.

The study included 12 male volunteers who were not habitual nappers but who agreed to try an afternoon snooze on both a stationary bed and a rocking bed while machines scanned their brains, eye and muscle movements. (Can I volunteer for the next one?)

....may give you your daily dose of pesticides.

I was bummed out hearing this story, because one of my favorite snacks is an apple with peanut butter on it. Apples are at the top of the list of produce most contaminated with pesticides, says a new study.

Apples moved up three spots from last year, replacing celery at the top of the most-contaminated list; 92% of apples contained two or more pesticides.

It was coffee's fault that I was hallucinating!

A new report found that stressed coffee lovers are three times more likely to see or hear imaginary things than everyone else.

In tests, their sujects started hearing Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas." They tested 92 people with varied caffeine-intake and stress levels. Subjects thought they were doing hearing tests.  Then they were played three minutes of static hiss and asked to press a buzzer if they heard snippets of White Christmas in there -- which there weren't.

On average, low-caffeine subjects heard it once. But stressed coffee guzzlers buzzed three times.

One researcher said "If you are stressed and have a high level of caffeine, you are more likely to notice things that aren't there, see things that aren't there."

Now, if I could just get the Gremlin that lives under my desk to go away, things would really be improving here.

 

Would you rather have big bucks…or a perfect body?

\A new poll says only a quarter of us would rather have a dream body for the rest of their lives than win $1 million in the lottery. Almost half say if they were granted a single wish, they'd rather be at their ideal weight than be five years younger.

About a quarter of women say that Jennifer Lopez and Halle Berry have the kind of bodies they want; almost half of men say they'd like Matthew McConaughey's body type. Personally, I'd go for the perfect body.

Once the money payout hits $50,000,000, then I'd take the cash. I'd help get actor Richard Keil (Jaws from the James Bond movies) some new teeth with it too.

I knew those college days were gonna catch up with me, so let this serve as a cautionary tale.

A new Spanish study links binge drinking in college students to a lowered ability to remember lists of words, although the research doesn't prove alcohol is at fault and the drinkers did fine on a separate memory test.

In the study, researchers gave memory tests to 62 Spanish college students who were binge drinkers and 60 who were not, all aged 18 to 20. The students took two memory tests, one in which they were asked to remember words and another to remember details from images.

After the researchers adjusted the results to reduce the risk that they'd be thrown off by factors such as the various intelligence levels of the participants, they found that the drinkers scored worse on some parts of the word memory test, but not the detail test.

A new report says we're going a little bit over our teaspoon of sugar.

Experts says U.S. adults consume 22.2 teaspoons of sugar a day -- or 355 calories.  Of course we know  reducing the amount of sugar can reduce weight. 

Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst, trend-watcher and creator of the Web site supermarketguru.com, says Americans eat more than double the daily recommended amount of sugar added to food.

An appropriate amount for a woman with an energy requirement of 1,800 calories per day would be no more than 100 calories, or 6.25 teaspoons -- from added sugar, while a man with a requirement of 2,200 calories per day should eat or drink no more than 150 calories from added sugar or 9.4 teaspoons, Lempert says.

 

 

Now there's some new research that says mixing booze and those high caffeine energy drinks is even worse than drinking booze alone.

We'll duh.  A new study published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research provide some interesting insights into why. Cecile Marczinski, a psychologist at Northern Kentucky University, found that combining energy drinks such as Red Bull with vodka or other liquors effectively removes any built-in checks your body has for overindulging.

When you drink alcohol by itself, it initially induces a feeling of happiness — a comfortable buzz. But when you overindulge, your body knows it, and it starts to shut down; you start feeling tired, sleepy and more sedated than stimulated. "That's your cue to go home to bed," says Marczinski. 

But in her drinking study, for which she (easily) recruited participants, she found that people downing the combination of alcohol and energy drinks lost this natural control.

While an apple a day keeps the doctor away, a tangerine a day may provide even greater health benefits.

Scientists now say a substance found in high concentrations in the fruit prevents obesity and offers protection against type 2 diabetes in lab mice.

Their research found that the naturally occurring substance nobiletin also helped to protect against atherosclerosis — the disease responsible for most heart attacks and strokes.

Nobiletin is part of a family of molecules called flavonoids that are found naturally in citrus fruits. Tangerines boast the highest nobiletin concentration of any citrus fruit.

I think the hippies my have been wrong about drugs expanding the mind, but they were right about some other things.

Take for instance meditation and mellowing out.

In fact, some new research says that meditation may even be a more powerful painkiller than any drug.

Researchers at Wake Forest published a study measuring the physical effects of meditation on pain — and it turns out it might be more effective than morphine.

“This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.