Jane Brody sets the record straight on lactic acid: Long believed to be a caustic waste product, lactic acid is a good thing, says Brody–it’s the fuel the muscles make from glucose and burn for energy.  Brody tells us that the reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so […]

Now that a British study has indicated that working married moms enjoy better health than their underemployed or childless peers, researchers are wondering why that is the case. The Scientific American reports on the mystery, and on the study, which looked at the health of 1,400 women at different times […]

In this piece in Men’s Health, Matt Fitzgerald, author of The Cutting Edge Runner, gives us this year’s model of perfect running, in a clever "old conventional wisdom/new conventional wisdom" format. Here’s the latest: OLD CW You were born with your stride; make the most of it.NEW CW Change your stride […]

The New York Times takes a willing look at adventure racing in this report from the Endophin Fix, a 130-mile competition in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. The paper reports that in this race, in which 28 teams were given 41 hours to complete a course that included wilderness trekking, […]

Rodale’s one-year-old Best Life magazine has quit trying to distinguish itself from every other health and lifestyle magazine and gone back to the basics, which, not coincidentally, have paid off in spades for every other Rodale product. Here’s one now: Best Life’s Guide to America’s Best Body Shops. It’s a […]

Dermatologist Rachel Herschenfeld lends her considerable knowledge of the dangers of sunlight and the safety of sunblock to the Washington Post, for this informative question and answer fest. One reader asks: If my makeup has SPF 15 and my moisturizer has SPF 30, am I getting a total protection of […]

It’s possible that paintball is not the athletic pursuit of choice for the majority of Geezer’s gentle readers. It’s also possible that paintball is not an athletic pursuit. What it is, according to this comprehensive (read "really long") piece in the L.A. Times, is an adrenaline pursuit, although it seems […]

The London Sunday Times makes us an offer that looks very hard to refuse. We could enjoy improved sleep, reduced stress, increased energy, a faster metabolism, better digestion and rejuvenated skin, and all we have to do is clean out our acts. How? "Detox" is the frightening word chosen by […]

How clean is the air in your county? Now you can find out, by going to the home page of the American Lung Association and typing your zip code in the little white box. Too hard? The ALA also offers this clickable map of the 50 states to get a […]

Geezer remembers the dread that darkened the nation’s breakfast tables when it was first discovered that eggs were actually cholesterol bombs, and very probably the instuments of death in a plot by chickens to take over the world. Since then, scientists have figured out a couple of things about cholesterol […]