Thank you. We’re feeling better already, just knowing that you’ve taken the time to read this. Why? Because, as the Wall Street Journal reports, there is a well-documented correlation between gratitude and health. One study mentioned in the Journal found that health-care workers who catalogued their reasons for gratitude experienced […]

It’s not just a late-night television ad: you really can burn calories while you sleep. Actually, you already do burn calories while you sleep, but you can burn more of them if the bacteria in your gut is healthy. That finding comes from researchers at the University of Iowa, were […]

It sounds like something you would read on the Internet. Wait, you are reading on the Internet, but this time it appears to be supported by research conducted at the University of Liverpool: allantoin, which is found in botanical extracts of the comfrey plant (and in the urine of many […]

Can exercise stave off colds? The answer, according to New York Times health columnist Gretchen Reynolds, is very possibly. Reynolds’ opinion comes from a new study conducted at Chosun University in Gwangju, South Korea, that found that regular exercise strengthens the body’s immune system in part by repeatedly stressing it. The researchers […]

OK, this piece in the Wall Street Journal doesn’t really tell you all you need to know about sell-by dates, but it’s fairly informative. It tells us, for example, that most sell-by dates are set by manufacturers to let us know when food is at its “peak quality,” not when […]

Wake up! It’s time to read about one of the reasons you can’t sleep. Science Daily reports that researchers at Loughborough University monitored the moods, sleep patterns, and performance of 13 expert cyclists over the course of two nine-day periods of heavy training. What did they find? The envelope please….Instense […]

Contrary to popular belief, happiness doesn’t buy you a longer life. The bad news comes to you from researchers at the University of Oxford, where epidemiologists followed one million middle-aged women for 10 years, surveying them about their degree of happiness and their general health–blood pressure, asthma, arthritis, etc. The New […]

To stretch or not to stretch; that has been the question for the last several years, with one study claiming a benefit to static stretching and the next study arguing that stretching could impair performance. Now, from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology, comes a systematic review of hundreds of studies […]

Exercise may make you a better learner. That’s the suggestion of research conducted and the University of Pisa and reported in the  New York Times. The paper reports that researchers asked 20 adults to watch a movie with one eye patched while relaxing in a chair, and later to watch a […]

Is anyone surprised to learn that an extreme athletic contest, say the three-day Ultraman contest, which includes a 6.2-mile open swim and a 90-mile bike ride on day one, a 172-mile bike ride on day two, and a double marathon run, –yes 52.4 miles– on day three, can do some damage […]