Life Changes
Healing Through Storytelling: Lessons from The Odyssey
The journey of Odysseus in Homer's 'The Odyssey' offers profound insights into healing...
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- Written by: Brian Wallheimer, Purdue University
A rapid heating and cooling of milk significantly reduces the amount of harmful bacteria, extending its shelf life by several weeks.
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- Written by: Sonia Yun Liu, University of Sydney
When I am asked by friends what I do for living, I tend to raise eyebrows because my job is somewhat odd to many city people. That’s because I’m a poultry nutritionist.
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- Written by: Nadira Faber, University of Oxford
It is an open secret: while athletes dope their bodies, regular office workers dope their brains. They buy prescription drugs such as Ritalin or Provigil on the internet’s flourishing black market to boost their cognitive performance.
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- Written by: Jessica Loyer, University of Adelaide
Superfoods are everywhere these days. Once found only in niche health food shops, displays of “exotic” superfoods like açai from the Brazilian Amazon and maca from the Peruvian Andes now appear in supermarket chains, chemists, and convenience stores.
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- Written by: Annalijn I Conklin, University of California, Los Angeles; Nita Forouhi, University of Cambridge, and Pablo Monsivais, University of Cambridge
In a study of over 25,000 adults with detailed information about their eating habits, people with a greater diversity of foods in their diet showed a 30% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes over a ten-year period.
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- Written by: Shilo Rea, Carnegie Mellon University
Ordering lunch at least an hour before you eat could help you cut calories and avoid unhealthy impulse choices.
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- Written by: Ben Baumberg Geiger, University of Kent
For those of us that partake, drinking alcohol is often seen as a balancing act that weighs up the pleasures of drinking against the pains. Government regulation is often seen the same way, weighing the benefits of pleasure and freedom of the individual on one hand against the cost of crime and health harms on the other
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- Written by: Suzie Ferrie, University of Sydney
A recent article in The Guardian said coffee stunting kids' growth is just a myth promoted by 19th-century manufacturers of a coffee substitute. So does this mean the long-thought wisdom that coffee is bad for kids is a lie?
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- Written by: Senaka Ranadheera, Victoria University; Duane Mellor, University of Canberra, and Nenad Naumovski, University of Canberra
Most of us know eating fruit daily is a great way to try to stay healthy, with the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating encouraging us to eat two serves a day.
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- Written by: Nicola Jones, University of Warwick
A study of 12,000 people found that those who started eating more fruits and vegetables felt much happier.
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- Written by: Chris Hamlett, Nottingham Trent University
It is one of the distinct sounds of summer: the noise of people tapping the tops of their cans of fizzy drink before opening them. But does this widespread ritual really stop a can of beer or pop from gushing over?
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- Written by: Timothy Woodman, University of Bath
If you’ve ever tasted a really hot chilli you’ll know just how potent the effects can be. The burning heat sensation on the lips, on the tongue – and if you are not careful, on other more sensitive areas, such as the eyes – can be severe and last for a painfully long time.
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- Written by: Lisa Lewtan
When thinking about our health, most of us will only consider our weight and fitness level, but our lives are made up of so much more. When you understand what is actually going on in your life, you may develop clues as to why you eat and live the way you do.
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- Written by: ristina Sauerwein, Washington University in St. Louis
Moms who eat high-fat, high-sugar diets may be putting future generations at risk for metabolic problems, even when their offspring eat healthy diets, a new study with mice suggests.
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- Written by: Allison Hydzik, University of Pittsburgh
Potent doses of broccoli sprout extract activate a “detoxification” gene and may help prevent cancer recurrence in survivors of head and neck cancer, according to new research that confirms preliminary results released last year.
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- Written by: David A. Edwards, Vanderbilt University
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid narcotic about 100 times as potent as morphine, continues to be in the news, as deaths from fentanyl overdose continue to rise and even more potent nonpharmaceutical forms become available on the street.
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- Written by: James Carney, Lancaster University
It’s easy to explain the appeal of drugs like heroin and cocaine, which directly stimulate the brain’s reward centres. What’s less easy to explain is the appeal of psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin that produce altered states of consciousness.
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- Written by: Roger Pickup, Lancaster University
A golden era of antibiotics shifted the leading causes of death away from infection to cancer and cardiovascular disease. At the moment, we can still treat most infections as only a few are resistant to what is currently the last line of antibiotics – the colistins.
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- Written by: Garrath Williams, Lancaster University
Last week, the National Obesity Forum caused a furore by claiming that eating fat, including saturated fat, will help cut rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Public Health England hit back, calling NOF’s advice “irresponsible”.
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- Written by: James Borrell, Queen Mary University of London
In the past week you’ve probably eaten crops that wouldn’t exist in nature, or that have evolved extra genes to reach freakish sizes. You’ve probably eaten “cloned” food and you may have even eaten plants whose ancestors were once deliberately blasted with radiation. And you could have bought all this without leaving the “organic” section of your local supermarket.
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- Written by: Cameron Webb, University of Sydney
It only takes a single fly to alight on your picnic lunch to make you uneasy about what germs may have landed with it. But what harm can come from a fly landing on your food? Should you throw it away?
