On Veg Alone Are there really health benefits to a vegetarian lifestyle?
Westchester Magazine, November 2008
Quiet, Please! My article in the July 2008 issue of Ode on the health effects of noise.
Retirement: Keep Healthy Published in the June 23, 2008 issue of Barron's, some scribbles and good advice on aging healthfully.
Not the Same Old Drive-thru The meat is raised naturally; the packaging is recycled; the ovens use renewable power. New green fast-food chains are serving up burgers and fries to feel good about.
...My article on healthier, greener fast food is the cover story for the April 2008 issue of Ode magazine. This was great fun--and a bit fattening--to research!
Lisa R. Young: The Portion Teller: Smartsize Your Way to Permanent Weight Loss Carl's Jr's double cheeseburger contains a full pound of meat and 1,400 calories...American crossants are twice as big as those made in France...a single street-vendor pretzel consists of 6 servings...In her new book, Lisa Young, a nutrition consultant and faculty member at New York University, reveals many more disturbing facts about contemporary food portions and more important, explains how to "smartsize" the food you eat. This is a terrific book, whether you're trying to lose weight or want to avoid getting heavy.
Peter D. Kramer: Against Depression Not an easy read, but a worthwhile one. This is the main point: We should drop our romantic illusions about depression and look at it for what it is: a disease.
ScienceDaily reports about an ongoing study at UCLA that uses music to help kids with autism spectrum disorders understand emotions and social interactions. Here's an excerpt:
"The 12-week program uses elements from the Orff method — including
games, instruments and teamwork — and combines them with musical games.
The idea is to pair emotional musical excerpts with matching displays
of social emotion (happy with happy, sad with sad, etc.) in a social,
interactive setting."
The Orff method is a music education method developed by German composer (Carmina Burana)Carl Orff that uses movement and rhythm--clapping, dancing, chanting--as the foundation of musical education in all kids. The goal of this study is to see if the Orff training will enhance social communication and emotional functioning in children with autism.
As Claudio Monteverdi wrote in 1638, "The end of all good music is to affect the soul."
For more on the Orff-Schulwerk Association, a Cleveland-based organization dedicated to movement and music education for everyone, click here. Read more about this study at the UCLA site.
In a study published in the British Medical Journal this week, two University of New South Wales (UNSW) researchers concluded that head-banging to a typical heavy metal tempo could cause mild traumatic brain injury or concussion, and neck injury, particularly as the tempo of the music and angle of movement increased.
"Clearly it's a serious issue," said Associate Professor Andrew McIntosh, co-author and professor of biomechanics at UNSW.
"If you observe people after concerts they clearly look dazed,
confused and incoherent, so something must be going on and we wanted to
look into it." [Healthsifter's note: Maybe it's not just the headbanging....]
"These songs had an average tempo of 146 beats per minute, and at this
tempo we predict that head banging can cause headaches and dizziness if
the range of movement of the head and neck is greater than 75 degrees,"
the researchers wrote.
Got that? Don't move your head and neck more than 75 degrees (how would you know that, actually?). And really, here's advice from the investigators on avoiding this type of head injury:
To minimise the risk of head and neck injury, headbangers should decrease their range of head and neck motion,head bang to slower tempo songs by replacing heavy metal withadult oriented rock, only head bang to every second beat, oruse personal protective equipment.
I see a problem in implementation here, despite what I'm sure are the best intentions of these Aussie investigators. Check this out at YouTube.
