Hot MedFax

It's something you learn right away at just about any weight loss control program. If you leave the chips out, you're going to want to eat them. Now a new study confirms it.  According to newswise.com, keeping foods visible throughout the house leads to obesity. The Ohio State University study focused primarily on determining whether the home environment – architectural features and food storage and availability – was associated with obesity, but also measured a number of psychological factors. While architectural features had no relationship to obesity status, several food-related findings did. People in the study who were obese kept more food visible throughout the house and generally ate less-healthy foods, such as sweets, than non-obese research participants. The two groups spent about the same amount of money on food and reported eating similar amounts of total calories, but non-obese participants spent less on fast food than did obese individuals. That...

Uh oh.  A new study has found people are hard-wired to fall out of love and move into new romantic relationships. “Our review of the literature suggests we have a mechanism in our brains designed by natural selection to pull us through a very tumultuous time in our lives,” says Brian Boutwell, Ph.D., associate professor of criminology and criminal justice and associate professor of epidemiology at Saint Louis University. “It suggests people will recover; the pain will go away with time. There will be a light at the end of the tunnel.” As anyone who has endured a break-up knows, some break-ups take more time than others.  I didn't have a lot of serious relationships in my life (I met my husband in my late 20's), but they didn't all end the way I wanted and some of them certainly required much more time to recover (I remember, after one break-up, going running and as I circled the gym, realizing, well, I got through one minute.) Drawing largely upon the field of ...

Finally.  My dream come true. You can lose weight by eating chocolate.  Well, OK, maybe not exactly.  But a new study has found that chocolate is a rich source of bioactive compounds, particularly a group of molecules called flavonoids, plant compounds associated with several positive health impacts, according to newswise.com. Most diet experts agree it's not what you eat but how much you eat, and in what combinations.  I've been a Weight Watchers member, off and on, since high school and what I've learned is that you need to balance what you eat -- some fruit, some vegetables, some lean protein, some carbohydrates (like sweet potato and brown rice).  You can even eat popcorn! But teasing out the possible effects of the compounds in your diet, and how it may interact with various diet interventions, is rarely studied. It could be that simply consuming chocolate in combination with dietary interventions has no effect, or it could make such diets eve...

Who knew? When I filled in friends on "free-range" parenting after researching it on the Web, I actually thought I was smarter than I really was.  This, according to a new study , which has found that searching the Internet for information may make people feel smarter than they actually are, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.  "The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," said lead researcher Matthew Fisher, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University. "It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet." Scary. But it turns out that we're not just imagining ourselves as geniuses on the subjects we rese...