Making Science More Better For You on o1/08/08

Maybe she wants to rerecord "Show Me The Way"

Mariah Carey covets something belonging to Stephen Hawking, and it’s not his singularity theorems. Sick of writing notes during her two-day vow of silence before big shows, Mariah is convinced the theoretical physicist’s voice synthesizer is her ticket out of boredom, the Sun reports. “I need Stephen Hawking’s voice machine so I think and it comes out in a robot voice,” the singer said. Apparently unaware that Dr. Hawking’s infamous DECtalk DTC01 was discontinued years ago, Mariah also seems to think it’s psychic.

So Stephen Hawking gets carried into a room by six big naked dudes with shaved heads and then…

This just in: Sad people eat crap—and a lot of it

Unpopular high school girls gain more weight
Teens view of social status has health consequences, study finds
CHICAGO - Where a teenage girl sees herself on her school’s social ladder may sway her future weight, a study of more than 4,000 girls finds.

Those who believed they were unpopular gained more weight over a two-year period than girls who viewed themselves as more popular. Researchers said the study showed how a girl’s view of her social status has broader health consequences.

The girls in the study were still growing — their average age was 15 — and all of them gained some weight. However, those who rated themselves low in popularity were 69 percent more likely than other girls to increase their body mass index by two units, the equivalent of gaining about 11 excess pounds. (The body mass index, or BMI, is a calculation based on height and weight.)
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Girls who put themselves on the higher rungs of popularity also gained some excess weight, but less — about 61⁄2 pounds.

Both groups, on average, fell within ranges considered normal. But a gain of two BMI units over two years is more than the typical weight gain for adolescent girls, the researchers said.

“How girls feel about themselves should be part of all obesity prevention strategies,” said the study’s lead author, Adina Lemeshow, who began the study as a Harvard School of Public Health graduate student. She now works at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The research, appearing in January’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, used data from an ongoing study used frequently by scientists studying childhood obesity.

Weight and height data were reported by the girls themselves rather than getting weighed and measured by doctors; that’s a weakness in the study that the researchers acknowledged.

The researchers took into account the girls’ weight and BMI at the start of the study, along with their diet, household income, race/ethnicity and whether they’d reached puberty — and still found the link.

In the study, perceived popularity was measured in 1999 by how the girls reacted to a question next to a picture of a 10-rung ladder: “At the top of the ladder are the people in your school with the most respect and the highest standing. At the bottom are the people who no one respects and no one wants to hang around with. Where would you place yourself on the ladder?”

The researchers put the girls into two groups: the 4,264 who said they were on rung 5 or above, and the 182 who said they were on rung 4 or below. The weight gain link was based on those two groups.

Health consequences of social status
Clea McNeely of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health called the study strong. She said she wanted to know more about the 4 percent of girls who rated themselves below average in popularity, particularly whether they already were gaining weight faster before they rated themselves as unpopular.


“The reason this paper is so important is it has broader implications beyond weight gain,” said McNeely, who was not involved in the research but wrote an accompanying editorial. “Subjective social status is not just an uncomfortable experience you grow out of, but can have important health consequences.”

Experts know little about how to intervene in teenagers’ peer groups to improve health, McNeely said, but when adults set standards in schools, students treat one another with more respect.

Teenagers may give grown-ups “bored looks,” she said, but “adults are still the most important influential figures in their lives.”



Headlines of the day

Did Dr. Phil step over line with Britney?…(CNN)

Man Poisons Mini Bottles of Vodka to Drive 'the English Out of Scotland' (Breitbart)


It will actually be 30 extra months. It will just feel like 14 years.
Healthy Habits Can Mean 14 Extra Years

LONDON (AP) - To get an extra 14 years of life, don't smoke, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise regularly and drink alcohol in moderation.

That is according to a study published Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal.

After tracking more than 20,000 people aged 45 to 79 years in the United Kingdom from about 1993 to 2006, Kay-Tee Khaw of the University of Cambridge and colleagues found that people who adopted these four healthy habits lived an average of 14 years longer than those who didn't.

"We've known for a long time that these behaviors are good things to do, but we've never seen these additive benefits before," said Susan Jebb, head of Nutrition and Health at Britain's Medical Research Council. Jebb was not involved in the study.

"Just doing one of these behaviors helps, but every step you make to improve your health seems to have an added benefit," she said. The benefits were also seen regardless of whether or not people were fat and what social class they came from.

Study participants scored a point each for not smoking, regular physical activity, eating five servings of fruits and vegetables a day and moderate alcohol intake. People who scored four were four times less likely to die than those who scored zero. Researchers tracked deaths from all causes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and respiratory diseases.

Participants filled in a health questionnaire and nurses conducted a medical exam at a clinic. The study was largely paid for by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research United Kingdom.

Khaw said that the study should convince people that improving their health does not always require extreme changes to their lifestyles. "We didn't ask these people to do anything exceptional," Khaw said. We measured normal behaviors that were entirely feasible within people's normal, everyday lives."

Public health experts said they hoped the study would inspire governments to introduce policies helping people to adopt these changes.

"This research is an important piece of work which emphasizes how modifying just a few risk factors can add years to your life," said Dr. Tim Armstrong, a physical activity expert at the World Health Organization.

But because the study only observed people rather than testing specific changes, experts said that it would be impossible to conclude that people who suddenly adopted these healthy behaviors would automatically gain 14 years.

"We can't say that any one person could gain 14 years by doing these things," said Dr. Tim Armstrong, a physical activity expert at the World Health Organization. "The 14 years is an average across the population of what's theoretically possible."

Experts are also unsure if these new findings will actually improve the public's health.

"What stops people from changing their behavior is not a lack of knowledge," Jebb said.

"Most people know that things like a good diet matter and that smoking is not good for you," she said. "We need to work on providing people with much more practical support to help them change."




And we thought it was because they poached everything in lard.

Post 9/11 terror fears giving Americans heart problems: study

Post 9/11 fears of terrorism are giving Americans heart problems even if they had no personal connection to the attacks on New York and Washington more than six years ago, researchers have found.

A study by the University of California, Irvine linked psychological stress responses to the attacks to a 53 percent increase in heart problems, such as high blood pressure and stroke in a three-years period after Sept 11, 2001.

The study, published in the January edition of the Archives of General Psychiatry, is the first of its kind to demonstrate the long-term effect of the 9/11 attacks on cardiac health.

Most participants in the survey watched the attacks on live television while one-third had no personal connection to them.

Most subjects had no pre-existing heart problems and the results persisted even when risk factors such as smoking and obesity were taken into account.

"It seems that the 9/11 attacks were so potent that media exposure helped to convey enough stress that people responded in a way that contributed to their cardiovascular problems," Alison Holman, an assistant professor of nursing science at UCI and the study's lead researcher, told the Los Angeles Times.

The three-year study involved 1,500 adults surveyed at random whose health information had been recorded before the attacks.

Researchers quizzed participants about their stress responses in the weeks after the attacks and issued annual follow-up questions ending in late 2004.

Chronic worriers were the most at risk from heart problems, the study found.

Anyone care to describe the mechanism that causes this condition? Anyone? Oh, we see it’s a feeling. We’ve got to get us a stresso-meter so we can measure these things.