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Good for you! Bad for you! News at 11
Oct. 23rd, 2016 07:51 amWhen we hit the months that ratings seem to mean more than they do the rest of the year, we get a lot of sound bites about things that sound either really neat or really horrible and we have to see the newscast to find out more.
Since we now have digital cable boxes what we watch as any given minute is known to someone. The ability to figure out what America is watching is so much easier than it was even 10 minutes ago. But the Neilsen Ratings are still considered the gold standard for some strange reason. Interestingly enough if you go to their website, you can learn all kinds of things about what is trending in America. Like Coke made almost a million more than Pepsi in the same time period. Folgers seems to be America’s coffee of choice not Starbucks. Bud Light is the most popular beer. Huggies and Gerber have a lock on the American Baby dollar.
Recently there have been a series of articles about Multivitamins and whether they are worth the money that we plunk down on them. And if you actually read some of the research it is a big helping of Yes and No. Apparently the older you get, the more a multi can help you seems to be the current belief. You are not doing yourself harm by taking them and there still may be some benefits that will be revealed after more study. Personally I plan on continuing to take mine.
The science seems to be in agreement that exercise is good for you at any age. Moving helps the body in so many ways so even a little can help. However there are so many machines and gimmicks out there along with a lot of information about how to just get the fat off your abs, which is insane and impossible. When fat comes off, you cannot pick which part of the body it comes off of. It is sort of an all or nothing. Sit-ups cost you nothing except the expense of energy and still work.
Eggs keep going in and out of the good food category that I have seriously lost where we are in that. For a while it seemed that the yokes were little ticking time bombs that you ate but now apparently there are good things about the yokes so people are eating them again.
The fiber debate seems to be heating up again. Apparently we have been wasting our money buying whole wheat bread because it doesn’t do what they said it did or does it much less because of the amount of processing done to the bread. Personally by this point, I prefer the taste so I am not going to change my bread buying habits.
I am not sure about these cars that have alerts and take over driving if you are distracted. I am happy that this may very well save life and limb but my bigger concern is that the drivers of these cars are going to assume that the car will take care of them and be even more distracted while they drive. Interestingly enough driverless cars are not very popular with the very people that it might help.
Now I do believe strongly in the mind/body connection. That the mind and the body are not two pieces but one that work together to keep us moving. And they are discovering more and more how this works which is fascinating to me. We talk about bio-feed back and meditation and the like. But recently there have been some very interesting developments for paraplegics who have been using some robot legs that were developed by NASA and a virtual reality headset to relearn how to walk with the robot legs. The side effect was that signals started to return to their legs and, in many cases, they could move limbs that they hadn’t been able to move because the spinal cord was shut off for whatever reason. They aren’t able to walk on their own but a significant number have regained bladder control, which is a big issue for them.
We had a fine example of how hackers can invade your life (another soundbite I heard the other day) this past Friday when a set of servers were attacked and Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix, and number of professional job sites when down while the owners tried to deal with the attack. Also there was the fact that the RF chip in your bank and credit cards can allow hackers to skim your data so much easier than the magnetic strip ever did. This is not just something I heard on the TV either, I have had at least five friends get screwed over this way. And for two it was really bad before the banks agreed that it was not them spending their money. The faster they move to protect, the faster the hackers work to see how they can break the system.
If the news is to be believed then we should be in a steady state of panic all the time. Except when they do the feel good animal or people stories, which are suppose to make us feel better about ourselves and our world.
Personally, I am going to continue to eat and drink what I like in moderation. I plan to continue to exercise and do things that I believe will help my over all health. I will continue to take my multivitamins and a few supplements that have proven to help me and work with my body chemistry. I will continue to be mindful of my body and what I am doing to it both physically and mentally. And I am going to mute those soundbites when I see them on TV. Reduce the signal to noise ratio and give myself more peace of mind.
I am grateful for science as a whole.
Since we now have digital cable boxes what we watch as any given minute is known to someone. The ability to figure out what America is watching is so much easier than it was even 10 minutes ago. But the Neilsen Ratings are still considered the gold standard for some strange reason. Interestingly enough if you go to their website, you can learn all kinds of things about what is trending in America. Like Coke made almost a million more than Pepsi in the same time period. Folgers seems to be America’s coffee of choice not Starbucks. Bud Light is the most popular beer. Huggies and Gerber have a lock on the American Baby dollar.
Recently there have been a series of articles about Multivitamins and whether they are worth the money that we plunk down on them. And if you actually read some of the research it is a big helping of Yes and No. Apparently the older you get, the more a multi can help you seems to be the current belief. You are not doing yourself harm by taking them and there still may be some benefits that will be revealed after more study. Personally I plan on continuing to take mine.
The science seems to be in agreement that exercise is good for you at any age. Moving helps the body in so many ways so even a little can help. However there are so many machines and gimmicks out there along with a lot of information about how to just get the fat off your abs, which is insane and impossible. When fat comes off, you cannot pick which part of the body it comes off of. It is sort of an all or nothing. Sit-ups cost you nothing except the expense of energy and still work.
Eggs keep going in and out of the good food category that I have seriously lost where we are in that. For a while it seemed that the yokes were little ticking time bombs that you ate but now apparently there are good things about the yokes so people are eating them again.
The fiber debate seems to be heating up again. Apparently we have been wasting our money buying whole wheat bread because it doesn’t do what they said it did or does it much less because of the amount of processing done to the bread. Personally by this point, I prefer the taste so I am not going to change my bread buying habits.
I am not sure about these cars that have alerts and take over driving if you are distracted. I am happy that this may very well save life and limb but my bigger concern is that the drivers of these cars are going to assume that the car will take care of them and be even more distracted while they drive. Interestingly enough driverless cars are not very popular with the very people that it might help.
Now I do believe strongly in the mind/body connection. That the mind and the body are not two pieces but one that work together to keep us moving. And they are discovering more and more how this works which is fascinating to me. We talk about bio-feed back and meditation and the like. But recently there have been some very interesting developments for paraplegics who have been using some robot legs that were developed by NASA and a virtual reality headset to relearn how to walk with the robot legs. The side effect was that signals started to return to their legs and, in many cases, they could move limbs that they hadn’t been able to move because the spinal cord was shut off for whatever reason. They aren’t able to walk on their own but a significant number have regained bladder control, which is a big issue for them.
We had a fine example of how hackers can invade your life (another soundbite I heard the other day) this past Friday when a set of servers were attacked and Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix, and number of professional job sites when down while the owners tried to deal with the attack. Also there was the fact that the RF chip in your bank and credit cards can allow hackers to skim your data so much easier than the magnetic strip ever did. This is not just something I heard on the TV either, I have had at least five friends get screwed over this way. And for two it was really bad before the banks agreed that it was not them spending their money. The faster they move to protect, the faster the hackers work to see how they can break the system.
If the news is to be believed then we should be in a steady state of panic all the time. Except when they do the feel good animal or people stories, which are suppose to make us feel better about ourselves and our world.
Personally, I am going to continue to eat and drink what I like in moderation. I plan to continue to exercise and do things that I believe will help my over all health. I will continue to take my multivitamins and a few supplements that have proven to help me and work with my body chemistry. I will continue to be mindful of my body and what I am doing to it both physically and mentally. And I am going to mute those soundbites when I see them on TV. Reduce the signal to noise ratio and give myself more peace of mind.
I am grateful for science as a whole.
