Sleep with the blinds closed! Exposure to even dim light at night is enough to cause physical changes in the brains of hamsters (and humans?) that may lead to depression. But light DOES kill superbugs, which must be why, when you’re in the hopsital, nurses come over and shine a flashlight in your eyes at night!
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After eating that big turkey dinner, you’re probably feeling fat, and most of us are fat and getting fatter–why is this? Most people would say it’s because we eat too much and exercise too little. But that answer, while valid, may be a little too simple–there may be many other causes for obesity.
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After you eat Thanksgiving dinner, you may find yourself getting sleepy, because turkey contains a natural sleep-inducing amino acid called tryptophan. This is GOOD because cutting back on sleep reduces the benefits of dieting BUT sleeping too much may cause you to die younger. When dieters in a new study got a full night’s sleep, they lost the same amount of weight as when they slept less. When dieters got adequate sleep, however, more than half of the weight they lost was fat. When they cut back on their sleep, only one-fourth of their weight loss came from fat. They also felt hungrier. When sleep was restricted, dieters produced higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger and reduces energy expenditure.read more
Are you fat because you’re stressed? Or are you fat because of a virus you caught when you were a kid? A virus that can cause respiratory infections has been linked to childhood obesity. In the latest study, pediatricians found that fat children had antibodies in their blood that reveal an earlier infection with this virus. Blood tests of many obese adults also show evidence of this antibody. You might have even gotten fat because of the antibiotics you took to get RID of the virus. A new theory is that antibiotic use early in life has resulted in the disappearance, or extinction, of key bacteria in the human gastrointestinal tract that help keep the weight off.read more