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Is this for real?  A new study says the human race is in danger of becoming too attached to -- robots?  But it's true. Robots are being used for everything these days, from delivering trays to hospital rooms, to performing hysterectomies, to vacuuming rooms, to deactivating deadly explosive devices at war. "It's becoming more common to have robots sub in for humans to do dirty or sometimes dangerous work. But researchers are finding that in some cases, people have started to treat robots like pets, friends, or even as an extension of themselves," newswise.com reports. It almost sounds a little too far-fetched to be believed but some wonder "if a soldier attaches human or animal-like characteristics to a field robot, can it affect how they use the robot? What if they 'care' too much about the robot to send it into a dangerous situation?" A researcher at the University of Washington interviewed highly trained soldiers who use robots to ...

Finally!  It's okay to gain a few pounds.  In fact, it's even recommended! For older folks, that is.  A new study has found that some overweight older adults don’t need to lose weight to extend their lives, but they could risk an earlier death if they pack on more pounds. So it's not all good. But as I've observed with both my parents, my dad who's always been overweight, and my mother, who was not, each began losing a lot of weight in their 80s. My mother even became thinner than I ever remembered her.  The same thing happened with my grandmother, always a round little thing.  In her 80s, right before she died, she was down to skin and bones. Is it because elderly people don't care about eating anymore?  Or, as in my grandmother's taste, they lose their sense of taste and smell?  It's not clear. But the nationwide study found that people who were slightly overweight in their 50s "but kept their weight relatively stable were the most likel...

It's not just for teenagers and young women anymore.  Sadly, anorexia and bulimia are striking middle-aged and older women, too. A friend whose daughter recently married confided that, while she had lost seven pounds for the wedding (and this woman is thin), she found that, after the wedding, she'd eat something, see how many calories it was, then go work out for that exact same amount of calories so she didn't gain weight.  "I couldn't stop," she said.  "I see how you can get obsessed." In a recent study, women 60-70 were asked about their eating behaviors, weight history and how they felt about their bodies.  A shocking 90% said they felt very or moderately fat, and over half reported being dissatisfied with their bodies. You have to remember, we live in a culture where thinness to the point of boniness is prized, and these days, 60-year-olds want to look like 40-year-olds.  If they can't quite meet that goal, why not starve yourself? ...

Big surprise.  At least to me.  Do you know whose  binge eating  hurts them more?  It's men. According to newswise.com, "Obese men with binge eating disorder are more likely to develop metabolic syndrome, including high blood pressure, elevated glucose and high cholesterol." Women, of course, also suffer from this eating disorder but apparently it does not affect them the same way. Men have generally been under-represented in studies of obesity and of binge eating disorder, newswise.com quotes Tomoko Udo, Ph.D., associate research scientist in psychiatry at Yale University and lead author of the study. "People used to think binge eating was less common in men than women," she said. But sadly, that's turning out not to be the case.  We both are guilty of it. Binge eating disorder is defined as the repeated consumption of large quantities of food in a short period of time without the vomiting seen in bulimia. People with binge eating diso...

First, it was autism.  Now it's eating disorders.  A new study  has found that "young women are more likely to have disordered eating attitudes when their mothers often communicate criticism and are over-involved." Thanks a lot. Newswise.com quotes Analisa Arroyo, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, who said that young adult females whose mothers frequently engaged in “family expressed emotion,” which she explained as “an extraordinarily harmful pattern of criticism, over-involvement, excessive attention, and emotional reactivity that is usually communicated by parents toward their children,” tended to have poorer social and relationship skills." And those poor social and relationship skills were related to the daughters’ higher levels of psychological distress and disordered eating attitudes. What kind of disordered eating attitudes?  Anorexia. Bulimia. Binge-eating. Arroyo commented that these attitudes fo...

We're told not to smoke or drink while we're pregnant, run marathons (though some do), or decide to take up skydiving.  But did you know that milk is now another problem, too? Here's the deal.  Milk drinking is tied to height.  According to The New York Times, a new study suggests that the amount of milk a pregnant woman drinks may affect the adult height of her adult offspring. After adjusting for the mother's height, weight, BMI and other factors, researchers found that mothers who drank more than five ounces a milk a day had bigger babies, Nicholas Bakalar reports. By age 20, children whose mothers drank five ounces or more a day were a half-inch taller than those of mothers who did not. A team of scientists tracked babies born in the late ‘80s, and found that their height during adolescence was directly related to how much milk their mothers consumed when they were in the womb.  Another study found that drinking more milk raised babies' IQ (because of the ...

Guess who's getting 70% of the antibiotics in this country?  No, not your son's constant ear infections. Chickens. That's right. Chickens And because of that,someday you may die of an infection because antibiotic-resistant bugs have become a common form of death, according to The Washington Post. Farmers feed their chickens antibiotics to cut down on infections when the chickens are all pressed together in a tight space to grow.  They've also used them to make fowl grow bigger, though the government is making them cut back on that. But, as the AP reports, 2 million people a year develop serious infections -- and 23,000 die.  For the first time, the CDC has estimated how many people die from drug-resistant bacteria each year — about as many as those killed annually by flu. Why? Because of the growing threat of germs that are hard to treat since they’ve become resistant to drugs. "Antibiotics like penicillin and streptomycin first became widely available...