MaoBah - Interesting Health Topics, Celebrity News and Informational News

Many foods have been heavily promoted as being healthy. But not all of them are. Here are some foods which are far less “good for you” than most people believe.

Energy bars

Energy bars usually contain protein and fiber, but they may also be loaded with calories. That’s fine if you occasionally make one a meal, but most people eat them as snacks.

Granola

Granola sounds healthy. But it’s often high in fat, sugar and calories. Don’t be fooled by a seemingly low calorie count; the portion sizes on the label are usually tiny.

Salad Toppings

The pecans and Gorgonzola cheese on Panera Bread’s Fuji Apple Chicken Salad propel it into double-cheeseburger territory. Before ordering a salad, check its nutrition information.

Smoothies

Added sugars can make some smoothies the equivalent of drinking fruit pie filling. The smallest serving of Jamba Juice’s Orange Dream Machine has 340 calories and an astonishing 69 grams of sugars.

Sushi Rolls

Sushi rolls vary, and the fried bits and mayonnaise in some can really jack up the calories.

Yogurts

The “fruit” in yogurt is really jam (that is to say, mostly sugar).

Did you know that while you sleep, your brain processes the day’s information? It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying, filing, and making them more useful for the next day.

A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow you to recall them more effectively. It also lets your brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and what to let go of. Sometimes you can even do this forcefully while you’re awake. I heard it’s called selective amnesia, when you have bad experiences or memories and you just want to force yourself to forget them.

It’s been discovered that you need a minimum of six hours of sleep to see an improvement in your performance over the 24 hours following a learning session.

An article I read stated that "during sleep, your brain reactivates the patterns of neural activity that it performed during the day, strengthening your memories by long-term potentiation."

As this unconscious rehearsing strengthens memory, something more complex is happening as well—your brain may be selectively rehearsing the more difficult aspects of a task. It seems your brain needs time to process or “rehearse” new information, connecting the dots, so to speak—and sleep provides the maximum benefit.

As exciting new findings about sleep come in more and more rapidly, it becomes more and more clear that your brain is anything but inactive during sleep.

That article also mention that "it is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them, and by finding patterns within studied material even when you don’t know that patterns might be there. It’s also clear that skimping on sleep can interfere with crucial cognitive processes. Miss a night of sleep, and the day’s memories might be compromised."

So get at least six hours of sleep a day.. Something that hasn’t happened to me in about a week now.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
When the Toll House Inn’s Ruth Wakefield ran out of baking chocolate one day in 1930, she smashed up a bar of semi-sweet chocolate and added the pieces to her dough. Upon their removal from the oven, the cookies weren’t uniformly infused with melted chocolate, but rather studded with little chunks throughout. The signature sweet put her Whitman, Massachusetts inn on the culinary map.

POTATO CHIPS
Back in 1853, a customer at Saratoga Springs’ Moon’s Lake House had a chip on his shoulder. He sent batch after batch of fried potatoes back, claiming they weren’t up to his crunch standards. Fed-up chef George Crum sliced the final batch as thinly as possible, sizzled them in hot grease and laid on a healthy measure of salt. The then much more chipper customer proclaimed these crispy ‘taters a hit, and they quickly became a hit all throughout the region.

POPSICLES
One chilly night in 1905, eleven-year-old Frank Epperson left his soda making  equipment outside on his San Francisco porch. The next day, he found that stick with which he’d been stirring flavored powder into water had frozen upright in the mixture. In 1924, he applied for a patent for this "Epsicle," which he then redubbed "Popsicle," supposedly at the urging of his children.

CORN FLAKES
Strict Seventh Day Adventists John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg weren’t about to waste the stale, boiled wheat Will had left sitting out at their Battle Creek Sanitarium. They attempted to make long sheets of dough, but the process resulted in flakes, which they then toasted. Patients loved the new dish, and after experimenting with various grains, including corn, the brothers sought a patent for this Granose. The Kellogg’s company was formed in 1906, but John refused to take part, as he felt the addition of sugar to the corn flakes decreased their health benefit.

BEER
About 10,000 years ago, Mesopotamians abandoned their nomadic ways and became the world’s first agrarian society. Stored grains for bread became wet, and began to naturally ferment. Some hardy soul dared to drink the frothing mess, thus knocking back the world’s very first brewski.

COFFEE
The truth of this one is a bit murky, but the Legend of Kaldi maintains that an Abyssian or Ethopian goat herder noticed that his flock was acting especially frisky after chowing down on some bright red berries. After sampling some for himself and verifying the mood shift, he brought the berries to a local imam who studied them, eventually roasting and boiling a batch in water, thus brewing up the original cup o’ joe.

RAISINS
As early as 1490 B.C., Egyptian writings mentioned raisins being used as food, medicine, sporting contest awards, temple decor and tax payment. Evidence suggests that unharvested grapes were found dried on the vine, and determined to be sweet and delicious.

CHEESE
Pleased by cheese? It was likely discovered when an Arabian nomad toted along some milk in a container made from an animal’s stomach lining. The liquid hardened along the way in reaction to rennet - a naturally occurring stomach enzyme, making for the world’s first fromage.

SANDWICHES
Rumor has it that John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich found leaving the gambling table to be a royal pain, so he ordered meat to be delivered to him between slices of bread. An alternate tale suggests that work matters kept him pinned to his desk, thus necessitating the fork-free meal.

CHOCOLATE
Shards of Honduran pottery indicate that as far back as 1100 B.C., beer makers used cacao pods to ferment into beer. About 300 years later, a thrifty soul reclaimed the previously discarded seeds to brew into a non-alcoholic beverage all their own. Little did they suspect that they were in fact cooking up an obsession for the ages.

TOFU
While it’s impossible to pinpoint the particulars, one popular origin story maintains that in ancient China boiled, ground soybeans were accidentally mixed with impure sea salt containing calcium and magnesium salts, causing the slurry to gel. Another legend has it that a different Chinese cooked mistakenly dropped nigari, a natural coagulant, into a pot of soybean milk, resulting in a surprisingly edible curdle.

BRANDY
In the 17th century, vintners would boil their wine before shipping in order to lessen its volume (and the associated taxes) in Dutch cargo holds. It would then be reconstituted with water on the receiving end. What they didn’t expect was that the subsequent trip in the wooden casks substantially transformed and improved the original  product. 

WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE
Former Bengal colonial governor Lord Marcus Sandy was, upon returning to England, pining for his favorite Indian sauce and commissioned drugstore owners John Lea and William Perrins to recreate it from his descriptions. They’d hoped to sell it in their store, but the stench was too powerful, and they stashed it in their basement for two years. During this time, it aged and improved radically in flavor and odor and became a hit with their customers.

ICE CREAM CONES
During 1904’s St. Louis World’s Fair, Syrian pastry vendor Ernest Hamwi helped out a nearby ice cream seller who’d run short on dishes. He rolled his pastry into a cone so the ice cream could be scooped inside. It was a hit, but Italian immigrant Italo Marchiony had also arrived at that combo, acquiring a patent for an ice cream cone earlier in the year.
 

What a woman eats before pregnancy may play a role in whether the baby is a boy or a girl, according to surprising new research.

Women who have a hearty appetite, eat a lot of potassium-rich foods like bananas, and don’t skip breakfast appear more likely to have a boy. Previous studies have also shown that male embryos do best with longer exposure to nutrient-rich lab cultures.

It could be that more nutrients are needed to build boys than girls. Women who ate at least one bowl of breakfast cereal daily were 87 percent more likely to have boys than those who ate no more than one bowlful per week, a possible sign that they were skipping breakfast.

Among women with the highest calorie intake before pregnancy (but still within a normal, healthy range), 56 percent had boys, versus 45 percent of the women with the lowest calorie intake. Women who had boys also ate an additional 300 mg of potassium daily on average, and about 400 calories more daily, compared to women who had girls.

The research involved about 700 first-time pregnant women, and has been billed as the first to show a link between a woman’s diet and the gender of her offspring. The women were asked about their eating habits in the year before getting pregnant.

Being social is good for you. Your emotional and even physical health depends on social interaction. Social relationships can help you deal with depression, stress, and just plain old loneliness. But some people have a hard time figuring out how to be more social, and where to go to meet and make new friends.

Here are six ways to get started:

1. Join a club

There is a club for almost every possible passion, from anthropology to zoology. Check out your local alternative weekly’s “events” listing; many of the ongoing events will be club meetings. If all else fails, start your own club.

2. Attend a Meetup

Meetups are semi-informal gatherings of like-minded people, often at a bar or restaurant, who get together to just chat and get to know each other. Meetup.com is the place to go to find meetups in your area.

3. Take a class

Taking a class is a great way to meet people – while learning something new at the same time.

4. Teach a class

Nothing is more social than sharing your own hard-earned knowledge with people who can benefit from it most. Community colleges, adult extensions, and local government organizations (such as Parks and Recreation) are always on the lookout for people to teach either full-blown courses or shorter workshops.

5. Look up local bloggers or twitterers

There are a number of services to find blogs by location, such as Feedmap.net, Outside.in, and PlaceBlogger. If you’re on Twitter, you can use the advanced search function to find Twitterers “Near this place”.

6. Go to conferences

Seek out local conferences, take a stack of business cards, and go spend a day in the expo hall, which is usually free or cheap. Hand your card out to all and sundry, and collect theirs as well. At the conference itself, make a point of asking vendors what their product does.

Recent studies found out that it’s best to leave earwax alone. It’s actually protective because it has lubricating and antibacterial properties and that is according to one ear specialist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

The guidelines are the first comprehensive clinical recommendations meant to help health-care professionals identify patients with impacted wax and treat them properly. Panel members reviewed scientific studies and sought expert opinion to create the guidelines.

They conclude that if the ears are functioning well, then the presence of ear wax does not require anything. They added that using a swab can actually drive excess wax in further and it would complicate things because then medical attention is often needed to remove it.

Certain people need to pay more attention to their ear wax status. Those who wear a hearing aid, are much more likely to develop problems with ear wax. That’s because the hearing aid prevents the ear from doing its job which is to clean out excess ear wax naturally.

As people age, ear wax problems are more common, too, he said, with those over age 65 more likely to have problems than younger people.

Ear wax is beneficial and self-cleaning. Hearing aid wearers should get their ears cleaned once or twice a year by a health-care professional to avoid wax buildup, which can cause hearing aid feedback or even damage the device. When ear wax blocks 80 percent or more of the ear canal diameter, it can result in reversible hearing loss.

About 12 million people in the United States seek medical care each year for impacted ear wax, according to the guidelines. The panel advises the use of wax-dissolving agents such as water and saline to dislodge it by a professional. Irrigation, manual removal with special instruments or ear syringes are other options.

The guidelines advise against the use of cotton-tipped swabs, oral jet irrigators and ear candling (the use of cone-shaped candles that are lit to draw out the wax).

The new guidelines make sense, said Dr. Chester Griffiths, an ear specialist at Santa Monica–UCLA Medical Center & Orthopaedic Hospital, and an assistant clinical professor of surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine.

A diet rich in omega-3 fats may explain why middle-aged men in Japan have fewer problems with clogged arteries than similar men in the United States. The research found that Japanese men living in Japan had twice the blood levels of omega-3 fats, and also lower levels of atherosclerosis, compared to middle-aged white men or Japanese-American men living in the United States. Atherosclerosis is the buildup of plaque inside your arteries. Over time, they can lead to serious problems like heart attacks and stroke. Nutritional studies show that intake of omega-3 fats averages 1.3 grams per day in Japan, compared to 0.2 grams per day in the United States.