Hot MedFax

Admit it.  We've all had those moments where we'd like the friend who didn't invite us to her party get the stomach flu, right? Well, maybe it's just me.  But a new study says that revenge really is not so sweet.  I had a work friend who said don't get revenge, get even.  Yeah, she screwed me a couple of times, too. But despite popular consensus that “revenge is sweet,” years of experimental research have suggested otherwise, finding that revenge is seldom as satisfying as we anticipate and often leaves the avenger less happy in the long run, according to newswise.com. Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis is adding a twist to the science of revenge, showing that our love-hate relationship with this dark desire is indeed a mixed bag, making us feel both good and bad, for reasons we might not expect. “We show that people express both positive and negative feelings about revenge, such that revenge isn’t bitter, nor sweet, but both...

What if the way you tasted creme brulee could determine how long you live? Amazingly, a new study has found that, in fruit flies, taste buds appear to help promote a long, healthy life. Of course, we're not fruit flies.  But they actually have a close resemblance to us.  According to the University of North Carolina, fruit flies share 75% of the genes that cause disease in humans." Newswise.com reports that t aste buds "may in fact have a powerful role in a long and healthy life – at least for fruit flies, say two new studies that appear in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  of the United States of America." Researchers from the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland found that suppressing the animal’s ability to taste its food –regardless of how much it actually eats – can significantly increase or decrease its length of life and potentially promote heal...

"The Doctors," that smug-Dr.-Phil show, was on in the background this morning and one of their segments caught my eye. Some woman asked if she plugged her nose while she was eating, would she eat less.  In other words, does your sense of smell affect how much you eat? They did a cute little demo of blindfolding her and clipping her nose, then fed her bits of food and tried to get her to identify them.  She only guessed potato right, but even with her sense of smell cut off, she still knew when the taste was a muffin.   "That's go-ooo-od," she said. So, here's the deal.  Our sense of smell is very important to our eating habits, but probably not in the way you think.  A friend recently lost his sense of smell from using too much nasal spray and now he eats everything he can get his hands on, hoping desperately to get a taste of some thing. But those of us who have noses who work can be thankful that they allow us to savor our food, to pick out the swe...