Real Age Quiz

So, you’re 56 – or 36. Maybe 27 or 42. Perhaps 68. (You get the idea.) Your driver’s license says it all (whether you want it to or not). But the buzz lately says there’s age and then there’s “Real Age.” Yes, your kitchen cabinets, weight set, medicine cabinet, diploma, car, even your speed dial apparently tell the real story your driver’s license (or dear mother) can’t.

The real story here is your “real” biological age as supposedly determined by your responses to approximately 150 questions. They run the gamut – from exercise routine to driving habits to nutrition to stress factors. At the end of the quiz, you receive a number as well as a rundown of practices that added to or reduced your biological age. According to the site, the quiz was based on “125 different factors that can influence the rate of aging” as determined by review of 25,000 medical studies. Some 27 million people have taken the quiz.

Posted By: Worker Bee

27

Environmental Damage

Grok had a lean physique, pearly whites, sturdy bones, and generally fantastic health (aside from trauma and warfare-induced injury) because he was surrounded by the food his body was designed to eat. A new study by Johns Hopkins University has concluded that environment still plays an enormous role in people’s health and wellness.

Poorer people, they found, tend to live in areas with less access to healthy food, while wealthier people have far more access to fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole, real foods (note that although the researchers’ idea of “healthy” included “skim milk and whole wheat bread,” the foods used to determine whether a neighborhood had access to health food were generally superior to the processed carb-laden fast food fare available in poorer areas). Unsurprisingly, access to healthy food corresponds to quality of diet, so the lower-income kid who walks past ten fast food joints on his way home is more likely to eat fast food (and get fat, along with the laundry list of ailments that accompany poor diet: diabetes, heart disease, etc). “You are what you eat” still holds true, but to that we can add, “You eat what you can access.”

Posted By: Worker Bee

11

Bitter Divisions and Murky Motives: Fibromyalgia Treatments

In yet another display of their unlimited zeal for the treatment (not prevention, mind you) of mysterious and “murky” illnesses (usually, believe it or not, with the aid of expensive pills), pharmaceutical companies last year spent hundreds of millions of dollars (including $6 million in grants to “non profit” medical conferences and “education campaigns”) to establish the controversial fibromyalgia as a legitimate, serious illness requiring the kind of treatment only Big Pharma could possibly provide. On the surface, this seems like a relatively selfless act of goodwill and honest research – just a couple of multinational pharmaceutical companies tossing their money around and savin’ lives… right?

Posted By: Worker Bee

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I’m Not Going to Say, “I Told You So”

Breaking news out of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Published online at pubmed.gov comes this abstract:

Metabolic and physiologic improvements from consuming a paleolithic, hunter-gatherer type diet.

Frassetto LA, Schloetter M, Mietus-Synder M, Morris RC Jr, Sebastian A.

1Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, San Francisco, CA, USA.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

26

The Dirt on Dirt

The prevailing opinion at MDA is that listening to one’s body is good policy. Natural instinct has been kind to us over the years – just as long as we listen to it. Oh, sure, some instinctual behaviors have little relevance nowadays and should be ignored (like our tendency to tribalize and shun newcomers for protection – made sense when we were living off the land in small inclusive clans competing for resources, but today it just causes war, racism, and nationalism), but most instincts are hard-wired into us for a reason. Consider salivation, which tells us delicious, wholesome food is to be had (I know I’m not the only one with an utterly Primal tendency to drool at the prospect of a rare steak), or our sense of fairness, which makes for a more harmonious environment (good for survival and for everyone involved). We like to stress the importance of listening to your body’s natural inclinations.

Posted By: Worker Bee

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