Story in today’s The News & Observer about the high cost and other challenges of feeding kids a healthy lunch at school. Healthy food is more expensive — and thus costs the kids/parents more — and because most high schools at least let older kids leave campus over lunch, there’s competition from the outside. I believe McDonald’s Dollar Menu was mentioned.read more
As he stood next to a stack of books and a table full of killer food Sunday afternoon at the Barnes & Noble across from Cary Towne Center, the icons of Matt Goulding’s life were within 50 yards. Across Maynard Street was Cary High School, where Goulding graduated in 1999; at the far end of the parking lot was Macaroni Grill where he rose from busboy to the chain restaurant’s chief antagonist (and more recently, a key ally). And the books next to him represented the franchise created by him and David Zinczenko and that has succeeded far beyond their — or anyone’s — dreams.read more
While fitness and health experts would like you to get an hour’s exercise a day, they’ll tell you that, above all, the key thing is to just move. With that in mind, here are a number of Earth Day “just move” events this weekend. (Yes, technically Earth Day isn’t until Thursday. But Thursday doesn’t fall on a weekend, this Saturday and Sunday happen to.)read more
Don’t have a stroke. And if you’re a woman, you’ll be less likely to have one if you walk two hours or more a week at a “brisk” pace. This according to a study published in “Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association,” which found that women exercising at this level were 37 percent less likely to have a stroke of any kind than sedentary types. Further, these brisk-paced walkers had a 68 percent lower risk of suffering a hemorrhagic stroke and a 25 percent lower risk of suffering an ischemic stroke. The exact relationship between walking and reduced stroke risk is unclear. The study was conducted as part of the long-term Women’s Health Study, a long-term study of 39,315 female health professionals who are predominantly white and whose average age is 54. Read more here.
Diet alone isn’t enough (again). More research, this time from the Oregon Health & Science University, shows that cutting back on calories alone isn’t enough to lose a significant amount of weight — you’ve got to exercise, too. In this latest affirmation of the need for diet and sweat, the school studied 18 female rhesus macaque monkeys. The monkeys were put on a high-fat diet for several years, then put back on a low-fat diet with a 30 percent reduction in calories. After a month, they exhibited no significant weight loss. During that time as well, the reduction in calories caused the monkeys to become less active. Another reduction in calories a month later saw the monkeys slack off even more. By comparison, a group of monkeys fed a normal monkey diet and trained to exercise for an hour a day on a treadmill did lose weight. The study offers further support to the belief that when the body receives fewer calories it tends to conserve what it’s getting. Read more here.
Pregnant women don’t exercise enough. A study at UNC-Chapel Hill finds that fewer than one in four pregnant women get enough exercise — “enough” being at least 30 minutes a day, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or 150 minutes a week, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Physical activity during pregnancy … may help prevent gestational diabetes, support healthy gestational weight gain and improve mental health,” according to Kelly Everson, research associate professor of epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and author of the study. The most common form of exercise for the moms-to-be who did exercise: walking. Read more here.
Don’t let being critically ill keep you from exercising. Exercise even benefits the critically ill, according to a study done in the medical intensive care unit at Johns Hopkins. 57 critically ill patients were put through 30- to 45-minute exercise sessions, which “included any combination of either leg or arm movements while lying flat in bed, sitting up or standing, or walking slowly in the ICU corridors.” The exercise both sped up recovery times and cut in half the amount of prescription sedatives required per patient. Read more here.
Weight training-related injuries up If you use free weights don’t drop them, especially on yourself. A just-released study conducted by the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital finds that injuries from weight training increased nearly 50 percent between 1990 and 2007, largely the result of males dropping weights on themselves. The study, to be published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, found that of the 970,000 weight training-related injuries recorded during that 18-year span, 82 percent were suffered by males, 47 percent by lifters age 13 to 24. Ninety percent of the injuries involved free weights, 65 percent involved the lifter dropping said free weight on their person. Read more in this Science Daily post. (Similarly, injuries from rock climbing and the use of ladders and hot tubs were also up.read more