July 28 2011

Providing a massage offers relaxation boost, new study in birds finds

Is your boyfriend or girlfriend begging for a massage? Go ahead, give it to them. A new study of the social life of birds finds that while it's better to receive than to give, an individual providing a massage can expect a relaxation boost as well.

Birds don't give massages, of course; instead, they groom one another. But just like in humans, this social behavior promotes bonding and de-stresses the animals, according to a new study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biology Letters.

"Giving of these kinds of social behaviors can be rewarding in their own right," said study researcher Andrew Radford, a biologist at the University of Bristol. "You might be gaining something yourself in being nice in that way, by reducing stress."

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July 27 2011

Actress Rosario Dawson has some pointed words about expectations on women and their bodies.

"It's a form of violence in the way that we look at women and the way we expect them to look and be for what sake? Not for health, survival, not for enjoyment of life, but just so you could look pretty," Dawson told Shape Magazine.

Dawson who appears on the August cover discussed industry-wide pressures to maintain an ideal body type.  After losing weight to play a drug addict dying of HIV/AIDS in the 2005 film "Rent," she was stunned to hear compliments about her  figure. “I remember everyone asking what did you do to get so thin? You looked great,” Dawson recalled. “I looked emaciated.”

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New York City's requirement that fast-food restaurants post calorie counts on menus led one in six customers to notice the information and buy foods with fewer calories, according to new research released on Tuesday. While overall calorie consumption for the thousands of people tracked did not change, customers of McDonald's, Au Bon Pain and Yum Brands Inc's KFC were shown...

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July 27 2011

For those of us hoping to keep our brains fit and healthy well into middle age and beyond, the latest science offers some reassurance. Activity appears to be critical, though scientists have yet to prove that exercise can ward off serious problems like Alzheimer’s disease. But what about the more mundane, creeping memory loss that begins about the time our 30s recede, when car keys and people’s names evaporate? It’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s worrying. Can activity ameliorate its slow advance — and maintain vocabulary retrieval skills, so that the word “ameliorate” leaps to mind when needed?

Obligingly, a number of important new studies have just been published that address those very questions. In perhaps the most encouraging of these, Canadian researchers measured the energy expenditure and cognitive functioning of a large group of elderly adults over the course of two to five years. Most of the volunteers did not exercise, per se, and almost none worked out vigorously. Their activities generally consisted of “walking around the block, cooking, gardening, cleaning and that sort of thing,” said Laura Middleton, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and lead author of the study, which was published last week in Archives of Internal Medicine.

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