Category Archives: Health

Health, Science And Society

Taking The Stairs

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…is a key to a longer, healthier life.

I’m not surprised. If it’s less than four or five flights, I’ll always take stairs, rather than an elevator, if I can, both because it’s better for me, and I don’t like waiting for elevators. I occasionally beat the people in the elevator.

But more importantly, given my relative lack of opportunities for elevator versus stairs, our house is built upside down. That is, the living area is upstairs, and bedrooms are upstairs. The front door is at the top of a long outside staircase, and the first thing we do in the morning, generally, is to go upstairs to the kitchen. We probably do those stairs dozens of times a day, given that my office is downstairs, and we are both retired/working from home.

The house design has the additional benefit that it’s better for sleeping, because the downstairs bedrooms are cooler than upstairs, even when we have skylights open in the living room.

General Science, Health, Media Criticism, Science And Society

A “Fasting-Style” Diet

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Seems to have previously unknown benefits to the brain.

The problem with this article is that (a) they don’t really describe what the “fasting-style diet” is, in terms of how long the fast, or what days they do it, and (b), as with most nutrition studies, it’s probably based on self reporting, and it’s not clear that there are any controls.

I do suspect, though, that we didn’t evolved to three squares a day, which would have been hard as hunter gatherers, which is one of the ways that agriculture screwed up our health, though it allowed the existence of orders of magnitude more unhealthy people.

I personally fast almost every day until evening. Dinner (or supper, depending on your local vernacular) is my literal breakfast, though I don’t have bacon and eggs then.