Mark's Daily Apple

Banish Bake Sales?

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‘Tis the season (almost) for those holiday bake sales, church/temple bazaars, and school fundraisers. Can’t you see them? Friendly folding table arrangements with impressive displays of frosted, glazed, and baked creations in all homemade varieties. The glossy brochures full of burgeoning tins brimming with gourmet chocolates, peppermint bark, and all manner of confectionery sweets. (Not that anyone is off the hook for the rest of the year. Think sports season candy bars, Girl Scout cookies, and so on.)

Posted By: Worker Bee

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Loathe Handles: Belly Fat Increases Early Death Risk

Loathe your love handles? A study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests the extra belly fat isn’t just an eyesore; it can increase your risk of an early death.

While the link between extra belly padding and health problems has been long established, this new study is the first to show such a powerful link between pant size and death risk.

For the study, researchers from Imperial College London studied almost 360,000 people from nine European countries. The average age of participants at study onset was 51. Across the 10 year study period, 14,723 study participants died.

Posted By: Worker Bee

17

Off-Label Pharmaceutical Promotion

What can we say? We’ve got Pharma on the mind this week! On Monday Mark offered commentary on the latest “study” being spun to further promote statins to the general population. It seemed like an opportune time to bring you news of a recent report on the “unofficial” business of off-label pharmaceutical marketing and the clever manipulation of drug approval rules and research dissemination.

Two researchers with significant experience in the pharmaceutical industry, Adriane Fugh-Berman, M.D., an associate professor in the GUMC Department of Physiology and Biophysics, and Douglas Melnick, M.D., a preventive medicine physician in the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health have published a report in the free online journal PLoS Medicine shedding light on risky and legally questionable practices that have become commonplace in the industry.

Posted By: Worker Bee

15

Moisturize, Moisturize, Moisturize

Conventional wisdom (our dear, dear friend) tells us that without the constant application of skin creams and face lotions and mineral moisturizers, we’ll become haggard parchment people with wrinkled mugs that’d put an elderly Sharpei to shame. It seems to have worked, too. Most bathroom mirrors conceal impressive caches of creams, lotions, and oils, and many people instinctively and compulsively lather the stuff on any chance they get (similar to our infatuation with Purell, but that’s another post altogether). But, as we’ve often wondered, is confronting a totally natural occurrence – dry skin – with unnatural methods and products really such a good idea?

Posted By: Worker Bee

21

Compassion Meditation

When it comes to meditation, most of us probably think about inward focus, personal relaxation response, a deep concentration that allows for release and inner calm. And, certainly, meditation can offer that as well as an impressive host of physical benefits we’ve discussed in previous posts. (All part of the Primal Blueprint focus on comprehensive wellness…)

Posted By: Worker Bee

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