It’s a common nutritional fail–you pledge to make a nice, fresh home-cooked meal, but get impatient and opt for fast food instead. Now, new research suggests that ‘we are how we eat’ and that the mere thought of fast food can result in general impatience.
Researchers from the University of Toronto conducted a series of experiments in which they showed volunteers logos from several fast-food chains or asked them to recall the last time they’d visited, writes Scientific American.
And they found that folks who had thought about fast food would then read faster, even though no one told them to hurry. And they also expressed a preference for time-saving products, like shampoo plus conditioner. And they tended to opt for immediate rewards, like getting a small cash payment right away rather than waiting a week for a larger sum.
Looking at the results, the researchers conclude that a fast-food lifestyle may not only impacts people’s waistlines, but may also have a far-reaching and often unconscious impact on their behavior.
Is your child practically a vampire? Avoiding the sun, holed up at home, and playing video games non-stop? Two scientists in Britain now suggest there might be link between such inactivity and rickets–a painful bone condition caused by lack of vitamin D, and which is much more common in malnourished children of the developing world.
Researchers Simon Pearce and Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have published a clinical review in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal blaming the rickets resurgence on our more interior lifestyle. According to The Guardian, Pearce said:
“Vitamin D levels in parts of the population are precarious. The average worker nowadays is in a call center, not out in the field. People tend to stay at home rather than going outside to kick a ball around. They stay at home on computer games.”
Weight loss program Jenny Craig’s spokeswoman, actress Valerie Bertinelli, is hanging out in a gleaming white “lab,” surrounded by guys in thick-framed glasses and lab coats. She gleefully announces that people on the Jenny diet lost two times as much weight as those who were on the other big diet program (read: Weight Watchers). She also claims that the results were an outcome of a “major clinical trial run by serious lab geeks.”
Now, Weight Watchers has lashed back, dragging Jenny to court–alleging that the ad campaign makes “deceptive claims” about its success rate.
Surprise, surprise…. Fast food restaurants might be lying to your face.
According to the Los Angeles Times health blog, Booster Shots:
Researchers from Tufts University took commercially prepared foods — both prepackaged and from restaurants — and analyzed them in a bomb calorimeter. The measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated, and foods from 29 restaurants (both fast-food and sit-down venues) were on average 18% more than reported.
The most egregious offender? Denny’s, whose dry toast is advertised to contain 92 calories but actually packs a diet-busting 283 calories! If they can’t even get the numbers on toast right, just imagine the true caloric content of one of their Grand Slamwiches.
So if your New Year’s resolution includes getting back in shape, help yourself out by resolving to stop eating fast food and frozen meals all together.
Former FDA head David Kessler’s much-lauded book The End of Overeating discusses in detail the use of technology by the food industry to provide the maximum caloric/fat bang for the consumer’s buck. And nowhere is this more beautifully illustrated than in the following video, an unusually candid inside look at the making of pork rinds. Which are hardly an example of healthy food (and we’re using the word “food” liberally). Fried pig skin squares, anyone?
In case the shock value from Super Size Me is starting to wear off, here’s an excerpt from the abstract of a paper in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology. It was published last year, but the point is no less revolting today:
The purpose of this study is to assess the content of 8 fast food hamburger brands using histologic methods. Eight different brands of hamburgers were evaluated for water content by weight and microscopically for recognizable tissue types…Water content by weight ranged from 37.7% to 62.4% (mean, 49%)…The cost per gram of hamburger ranged from $0.02 to $0.16 (median, $0.03) and did not correlate with meat content. Electron microscopy showed relatively preserved skeletal muscle…Fast food hamburgers are comprised of little meat (median, 12.1%). Approximately half of their weight is made up of water. Unexpected tissue types found in some hamburgers included bone, cartilage, and plant material; no brain tissue was present. Sarcocystis parasites were discovered in 2 hamburgers.
It’s only Monday, and there’s already a toss-up for worst science article of the week. Scientists at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health seem not to have realized that when it comes to weight gain, we’ve got one thing figured out: The fewer calories you consume, the less weight you put on. So they spent time and resources on a study to reach the following conclusion: Drinking water is less likely to cause obesity in kids than drinking sugar-sweetened drinks like soda and juice.
Weirder yet, the researchers don’t even sound assertive, as if their hypothesis needs further testing—not drinking sugary beverages, they say, “can reduce” excess calorie consumption. Well, yes, it can—and it does.
But while there’s validity, however obvious, to the Columbia study, the U.K.’s Bath Spa University has just published its own, er, breed of ludicrous research: a study concluding that pet owners look like their dogs.
•Villagers in England chased away a Google car, saying that Google Street View is, yes, an invasion of privacy—and will also facilitate crime in their area.
•Good news for chocolate lovers: Eating it can help your math skills [ed. note: We refute this claim based on personal experience—we couldn't eat more chocolate, and couldn't be worse at math].
The Telegraph published an article this weekend headlined, “Sugary Snacks Help School Children Concentrate.”
Really?
Here’s what actually happened: In a study of 16 kids, researchers gave them fruit juice containing either artificial sweetener or glucose—the natural sugar that acts as the body’s main energy source. The kids who drank the juice with glucose scored better on memory tests than the ones who ate artificial sugar, and appeared to have longer attention spans as well. Study leader David Benton‘s main conclusion, then, was that children might perform better in school if they ate occasional snacks, rather than one big meal, and that a snack with some sugar might not be such a bad thing for them.
A baseball can’t curve without its laces, a tennis ball’s fuzz helps it travel further, and the dimples on a golf ball reduce drag, just like the ridges on a shark. These tidbits of trivia introduced a capacity crowd packed into the purple bleachers of New York University’s Cole Sports Center to the World Science Festival’s “Science of Sports” event Saturday afternoon. Former U.S. Olympic Committee director of coaching Tom Crawford led the event.
The presenters opened with nutrition science, especially important for the young athletes and their families who packed the gym. Three professional basketball players, Leilani Mitchell and Lisa Willis from the WNBA’s New York Liberty and Brevin Knight of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, helped about 10 elementary school-aged participants pick healthy food from a table. (Here’s a tip: After a workout, drink chocolate milk. Besides refueling you with proteins and carbohydrates, it’s delicious.)
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
It’s a common nutritional fail–you pledge to make a nice, fresh home-cooked meal, but get impatient and opt for fast food instead. Now, new research suggests that ‘we are how we eat’ and that the mere thought of fast food can result in general impatience.
Is your child practically a vampire? Avoiding the sun, holed up at home, and playing video games non-stop? Two scientists in Britain now suggest there might be link between such inactivity and rickets–a painful bone condition caused by lack of vitamin D, and which is much more common in malnourished children of the developing world.
Surprise, surprise…. Fast food restaurants might be lying to your face.
In case the shock value from 
It’s only Monday, and there’s already a toss-up for worst science article of the week. Scientists at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health seem not to have realized that when it comes to weight gain, we’ve got one thing figured out: The fewer calories you consume, the less weight you put on. So they spent time and resources on a study to reach the following conclusion: 
•Villagers in England 
A baseball can’t curve without its laces, a tennis ball’s fuzz helps it travel further, and the 
