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I've always had this nagging suspicion that daylight savings time might be responsible for a variety of deleterious health effects -- including things like increases in traffic accidents and other operator-related incidents -- so it came as no surprise when I read the following news blurb:

When researchers in Sweden examined the impact of daylight saving time on heart attack rates in that country, they discovered that people had slightly fewer heart attacks on the Monday after they set their clocks back in the fall and slightly more heart attacks in the days after they set their clocks ahead in the spring.

They presented their findings in a letter published in the Oct. 30 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

[snip]

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times, describing widespread use of placebos in treating patients, as a way to treat the patient's mental state rather than the actual problem.

The problem is that the placebos used are not inert -- rather, they prescribe drugs intended for other uses, such as headache pills, sedatives, or other relatively harmless drugs.

Researchers have discovered -- surprise! -- that obese women are self conscious (and/or fear injury) and those emotions prevent successful exercise:

Obese women may have a 'phobia' of exercise which stops them being active because they feel self-conscious and are afraid of injury, researchers argue.

Far from being excuses to be lazy, these 'mental barriers' are real problems which must be overcome to encourage overweight women to exercise more, a conference was told.

[snip]

[Participants] were asked what factors stopped them from exercising at the start of the programme, three months into it and at the end.

Wired has an interesting story about "exercise in a pill". The article outlines ongoing research into drugs that can mimic the effects of exercise, including, in one study, improving stamina 44 percent in "couch potato" lab mice.

Today, researchers are reporting that an experimental drug can mimic the results of an exercise regimen -- with no exercise required. After four weeks of taking the pill, mice who hadn't worked out displayed a 44 percent increase in their running endurance.

"It’s tricking the muscle into ‘believing’ it’s been exercised daily," said the study's lead researcher, Ronald Evans of the Salk Institute, in a release. "It’s basically the couch potato experiment, and it proves you can have a pharmacologic equivalent to exercise."

Low fat diets are not the best way to lose weight according to a new study.

The research which looked at more than 300 obese people found those who stuck to a Mediterranean or low carbohydrate diet lost more weight over two years.

Low fat diets are the most commonly recommended diets in the UK to help people lose weight, and also to reduce the risks of heart disease and cancer.

However, researchers led by a team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, found those on a Mediterranean diet lost on average 60 per cent more weight.

Link (telegraph.co.uk)

I'm watching my wife (LowCarbForLife) shrink before my eyes. Her body is being transformed by her dedication to the CAD/CALP lifestyle and her surprising (to me, anyway) enthusiasm for regular aerobic and weight training exercises.

I know she can't really see it, and we didn't take a 'before' picture (she's too modest for that), so we don't have an objective, visual way to compare her current shape to what it was when she started only a few months ago. But I can see the changes every week, and I can feel them as well -- when I put my arms around her, she feels like a different person, except that I remember that this is how it felt a long time ago... (yes, I remember.)