Category: health
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Quick and easy health tips from experts in their field
The Wellness column in The New York Times is a perennial favourite, for the way they cover mental and physical health topics in a range of styles: from narrative-driven stories to hard scientific articles, but always with expert input and guidance. For quick and easy-to-digest nuggets of wisdom, articles like this really sate my desire…
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Longevity FAQ and Longevity 101: Your Beginner’s Guides
I find the concept of longevity and longevity research fascinating, from both a scientific and philosophical perspective: it’s cool to read about how researchers have effectively reversed the ageing of some mice, and I find it endlessly curious how large swathes of society want to ‘solve’ ageing (or, maybe more accurately, the other things that…
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International, Multilingual Eye-test Chart, 1907
At the turn of the twentieth century, in San Francisco, German optometrist George Mayerle created and published the “international” eye-test chart: “an artifact of an immigrant nationāproduced by a German optician in a polyglot city where West met East (and which was then undergoing massive rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake)āand of a globalizing economy”. Running…
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The Scientific 7-Minute Bodyweight Workout
Back in 2013, Scientists from the Human Performance Institute published an article in the American College of Sports Medicineās Health & Fitness Journal titled, High-intensity circuit training using body weight. To address the limitations of traditional exercise protocols, ā¦ one of the exercise strategies we use is high-intensity circuit training (HICT) using body weight as…
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Stretch 15: Daily Dose of Stretching Exercises
Stretch 15 is a straight-forward web app designed to get you stretching more. You just indicate whether you’re in the office or at home, and it gives you a timer and indicates which stretches to do, when. The site tracks your total stretch time and your daily stretch ‘streak’, if you’re into that type of…
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Outliers, Regression and the Sports Illustrated Myth
By appearing on the cover ofĀ Sports Illustrated, sportsmen and women become jinxed and shortly thereafter experience bouts of bad luck, goes theĀ Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx myth. āEvidenceā of the myth comes in the form of many individuals and teams who have died or, more commonly, simply experienced bad luck in their chosen vocation shortly after…
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Sedentary Lifestyle? Exercise Isn’t Helping
A somewhat sedentary lifestyle combined with regular exercise is turning us into what physiologists are calling ‘active couch potatoes’–and that exercise, no matter how vigourous, doesn’t appear to be counteracting the negative effects of that sedentary lifestyle. In rats, this lifestyle was found to produce “unhealthy cellular changes in their muscles” and increase insulin resistance…
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The Effectiveness of Social Support on Exercise Goals
Informing our friends and family of our resolutions in hope that the social support will encourage us is an effective tactic–as long as these people ‘check-in’ on our progress at semi-regular intervals. That’s the conclusion from a study where three groups of people had their exercise goals tracked under one of three conditions: a regular…
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Nine Diet and Lifestyle Tips for Longevity
By studying the world’s Blue Zones–“communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age”–Dan Buettner and team discovered a set of common behavioural traits in their subjects. In his TEDxTC talk Buettner discusses what he discovered to be the myths of living longer and the nine common diet and lifestyle habits of those…
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More on the Cognitive Benefits of Moderate Exercise
“There is overwhelming evidence that exercise produces large cognitive gains and helps fight dementia”, says the Harvard University psychologist John Ratey, author of the 2008 book on the subject, Spark. While Ratey propounds the “very clear” link between exercise and mental acuity, saying that even moderate exercise pushes back cognitive decline by “anywhere from 10…