How Eating Slowly Will Help You Lose Weight [Food]

http://lifehacker.com/5116120/how-eating-slowly-will-help-you-lose-weight

from Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy

There are a lot of factors in losing and maintaining a healthy diet and weight, but the HealthAssist blog points out that eating slowly might play a larger role than you realize.
Along with the general knowledge of your body needing more time to figure out it's full than most rush-rush meals allow for, "insulin resistance" and other factors suggest eating more slowly is something to strive for.

Portion size and eating speed seem to be part of the reason for the famous “French paradox” — the relatively low incidence of heart disease and overweight in France as compared to the United States, despite the generally high intake of calorie-rich foods and saturated fat. It is well documented that the French take longer to eat than Americans, despite the French eating smaller portions. Recently Japanese researchers found strong positive correlation between rate of eating and body mass index (BMI) and obesity

Having recently been kept from lunch until about 2:30 p.m. by travel delays, I was surprised at how one sandwich and a tiny Diet Coke, eaten during a leisurely conversation, managed to tide me over, despite my usual preference for the over-stuffed specials and the like.
How do you manage to fit a slow meal into a busy day? Or do you see calories as calories, regardless of their intake speed? Tell us your take in the comments.Photo by Bombardier.

9 Strong Reasons To Eat Slowly [HealthAssist]

Does alcohol kill brain cells?

Does alcohol kill brain cells?

JOHN, MERIDIAN, ID

Men's Health answers

"The concentration of alcohol in the brain of even a terrifically drunk person doesn't come close to the levels required to kill living cells," says Stephen Braun, a science writer and the author of Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine. People become intoxicated with only a tenth of a percent of alcohol in their blood. But alcohol is a "dirty bomb," Braun says. Rather than zeroing in on one specific region of the brain, alcohol impacts your entire noggin. The result: A few drinks can temporarily block new memory formation, dull your thinking, and reduce muscle control.

How Do Painkillers Find & Kill Pain?

How Do Painkillers Find & Kill Pain?
by Matt Soniak - May 10, 2008 - 12:24 PM

First, we need to make a distinction between the two main classes of painkillers, which are used for different situations and function via different mechanisms.

The first class is the narcotic opioid drugs. These are the heavy-duty drugs, like morphine and codeine, used to treat severe pain. They relieve pain in two ways: first by interfering with and blocking the transmission of pain signals to the brain, and then by working in the brain to alter the sensation of pain. These drugs neither find nor kill pain, but reduce and alter the user’s perception of the pain. They’re kind of like having an optimistic friend that says, “Hey man, everything will be cool. Nothing’s wrong. Here, look at this shiny, distracting thing!”

The other class is the aspirin drugs, like paracetamol and ibuprofen. These are the over the counter drugs we reach for whenever we’ve got a headache or a sore back. Throughout history, people all over the world were using botanical remedies for pain. The ancient Egyptians used leaves from the myrtle bush, Europeans chewed on hunks of willow bark and Native Americans did the same with birch bark. In the nineteenth century, scientists isolated the chemical in all these plants that gave them their pain relieving properties: salicin (which is metabolized to salicylic acid when consumed). They also discovered that these chemicals produced the side effect of horrendous digestive problems (which answers that other burning question, “Why is that Native American in that old commercial crying?”).

Eventually, a scientist at Bayer Pharmaceutical synthesized a less harmful derivative chemical, acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). Bayer dubbed it Aspirin and commercialized it. Hoffmann went on to develop a “non-addictive” substitute for morphine. The resulting product, heroin, was less successful than aspirin. [Bayer image courtesy of Wacky Packages.]

Despite its long history, we didn’t discover how aspirin works until the early 1970s. Unlike narcotics, aspirin drugs are real workhorses that actually go to the source of pain and stop it. When cells are damaged, they produce large quantities of an enzyme called cyclooxygenase-2. This enzyme, in turn, produces chemicals called prostaglandins, which send pain signals to the brain. They also cause the area that has been damaged to release fluid from the blood to create a cushion so the damaged cells don’t take any more of a beating. This cushion is the swelling and inflammation that goes along with our aches and pains. When we take aspirin, it dissolves in our stomachs and travels through the whole body via the bloodstream. Although it’s everywhere, it only works its magic at the site of cell damage by binding to the cylooxygenase-2 enzymes and stopping them from prostaglandins. No more prostaglandins means no more pain signals. The cells at the damage site, of course, are still damaged, but we’re left blissfully unaware.

This prostaglandin-stopping power is also why people take aspirin regularly to reduce the risk of heart attacks, since prostaglandins in the bloodstream can cause clotting. Additionally, aspirin reduces the production of thromboxane, a chemical that makes platelets, a type of blood cell, sticky. With aspirin in our systems, platelets make less thromboxane and are less likely to form a clot and block an artery.