Coffee - Super Health Drink

Coffee is great for your health!  Not just 'good', Great!  It can reduce risk of heart disease (very, very, extremely slightly).   The speedy caffeine stimulates your nervous system and so kind of stops you suffering from depression, because you're too wired to be glum.  Among it's miraculous properties, coffee can ward off Alzheimers, skin cancer, breast cancer, Parkinson's and gallstones.  Some professor from the Harvard School of Public Health says it has more antioxidants than most fruit and vegetables.  So why have I been bothering with all those green things when I could have just been glugging down litres of life-giving coffee?

Source:  Sault Star (Canada)

Bouncing to Hospital

You know that Bouncy Castle your kid is demanding for his birthday next week?  Well forget it.  Children are bouncing off these things and into ERs like there's no tomorrow.  They have no sense, kids.  Especially boys.  

Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Beer Belly? Not Good.

The good people at Harvard Medical School have done it again, discovering that drinking lots of beer may not be the best for your health.  They tested a bunch of men in their mid thirties, and found out that the ones with beer bellies are turning their bones into dust.  The picture above is the exact one the Daily Mail used to illustrate this report, so I hope they don't mind me reproducing it above.  I hope this gent was handsomely remunerated for donating his image. Anyway, long story short, if you drink so much beer that you are buying your pants in the large man's store then don't expect good things to happen.



Source:  Daily Mail

High Heels, Short Toes

According to the Boston Globe some women are getting little toes surgically removed so as to fit into elegantly tailored high heeled shoes.  Now as any half-way sensible person will tell you, this is a less than wonderful idea.  Is it really worth a lifetime of gimping around the place for the sake of squashing your foot into clearly inappropriate footwear for a sequence of evenings out in your twenties and early thirties?  You know you're only going to be slobbing around the place in those big clompily comfortable trainers when you've got a couple of kids and your idea of a big night out is a bottle of wine and the X Factor final.  I sincerely hope that this story falls under the category of Urban Legend.


Source:  Boston Globe

No Yolking Matter

Eggs are bad for you again.  Particularly the tasty yellow part of the egg.  It's "Worse Than Smoking Cigarettes" (for people over 40, and only if the 'worse' part refers specifically to the rate of thickening of arteries.  Plus it's not actually quite as bad as smoking cigarettes).  

Based upon this article, the scientific community is confused about eggs.  It doesn't quite know what to make of them.  For hundreds of years they were fine, up until the point at which people started to realise that eating some types of food isn't always good for your health.  Then they were awful for a number of years, until they were pretty much fine again, and now not so much. 

Hope that helps.


Source:  Chicago Tribune