Category Health & fitness

YummySoup 2 recipe management software

HungrySeacow Soft­ware has just released ver­sion 2 of Yummy­Soup, my favour­ite recipe man­age­ment soft­ware for the Mac.

With this ver­sion they’ve intro­duced a weekly meal plan­ner and the abil­ity to eas­ily share recipes (sub­scribe to my favour­ite recipes).

They say they have an iPad and iPhone ver­sion in the works too.

Why drowning often doesn’t look like drowning

Drown­ing Doesn’t Look Like Drown­ing:

The Instinct­ive Drown­ing Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or per­ceived suf­foc­a­tion in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splash­ing, no wav­ing, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.

Snake Oil? Scientific evidence for popular health supplements

Great chart by Inform­a­tion is Beau­ti­ful:

It’s a “bal­loon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evid­ence for its effect­ive­ness. But the sup­ple­ments are only effect­ive for the con­di­tions lis­ted inside the bubble. You might also see mul­tiple bubbles for cer­tain sup­ple­ments. These is because some sup­ple­ments affect a range of con­di­tions, but the evid­ence qual­ity var­ies from con­di­tion to con­di­tion. For example, there’s strong evid­ence that Green Tea is good for cho­les­terol levels. But evid­ence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting.

Doctors think you’re a vegetable but you can hear everything they say

I watched The Diving Bell and the But­ter­fly the other night, a film based on real events about a man that is totally para­lysed and can only com­mu­nic­ate by blink­ing his eye.

But this is some­thing else, amaz­ing:

For seven years the man lay in a hos­pital bed, show­ing no signs of con­scious­ness since sus­tain­ing a trau­matic brain injury in a car acci­dent. His doc­tors were con­vinced he was in a veget­at­ive state. Until now.

To the aston­ish­ment of his med­ical team, the patient has been able to ­com­mu­nic­ate with the out­side world after sci­ent­ists worked out, in effect, a way to read his thoughts.

They devised a tech­nique to enable the man, now 29, to answer yes and no to simple ques­tions through the use of a hi-tech scan­ner, mon­it­or­ing his brain activity.

To answer yes, he was told to think of play­ing ten­nis, a motor activ­ity. To answer no, he was told to think of wan­der­ing from room to room in his home, visu­al­ising everything he would expect to see there, cre­at­ing activ­ity in the part of the brain gov­ern­ing spa­tial awareness.

His doc­tors were amazed when the patient gave the cor­rect answers to a series of ques­tions about his family.

How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All’

Amy Wal­lace writ­ing for Wired: An Epi­demic of Fear: How Pan­icked Par­ents Skip­ping Shots Endangers Us All: The rejec­tion of hard-won know­ledge is by no means a new phe­nomenon. In 1905, French math­em­atician and sci­ent­ist Henri Poin­caré said that the will­ing­ness to embrace pseudo-science flour­ished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder…

Food for thought

Chan­nel 4’s Dis­patches last night: Do You Know What’s in Your Break­fast? A reminder that, in capitalism, it’s not the job of the food industry to provide good healthy food. Their job is to make as much money by whatever means neces­sary, even if that means sneak­ing copi­ous amounts of sat­ur­ated fat, sugar and salt into…

Want to be bemused?

Then try fol­low­ing the debate pro­pa­ganda war on health care reform in the U.S. Dar­ing Fire­ball has a couple of pearlers: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part One You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part Two Update: Stephen Hawk­ing: I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told us. “I have…

Out of proportion

Dr John Crip­pen: We met at lunch­time [to talk] of flu. There have been deaths in Mex­ico. There has been one in the US. Our Indian part­ner said: “There were 2,000 deaths, mainly chil­dren in Africa and Asia, yes­ter­day.” Our med­ical stu­dent looked shocked: “I didn’t know swine flu had reached that part of the…

Detox quackery

Prince Charles detox ‘quack­ery’, BBC “Noth­ing would, of course, be easier than to demon­strate that detox products work. All one needed to do is to take a few blood samples from volun­teers and test whether this or that toxin is elim­in­ated from the body faster than nor­mal,” [Pro­fessor Ernst] said. “But where are the studies…

Inside the vaccine-and-autism scare

A pedi­at­ri­cian traces the rise of the anti-vaccine move­ment that falsely linked thi­merosal with aut­ism and turned par­ents away from the most lifesav­ing medi­cine in his­tory. Wakefield’s research was secretly bank­rolled by a per­sonal injury law­yer whose cli­ents were suing MMR makers. Wake­field him­self was given close to a mil­lion dol­lars to prove that the MMR

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