Why would Black Friday link with cholesterol? Simple answer is that it reminds about your health. On black friday, people are more conscious about what to do during this black friday. If you have a slight health problem like high cholesterol, you will be more mindful to even lower your cholesterol level.
1. Sumqayit, Azerbaijan–This area gained the dubious distinction of landing atop the Blacksmith Institute’s list of the world’s most polluted sites. Yet another heir to the toxic legacy of Soviet industry, this city of 275,000 bears heavy metal, oil and chemical contamination from its days as a center of chemical production. As a result, locals suffer cancer rates 22 to 51 percent higher than their countrymen, and their children suffer from a host of genetic defects, ranging from mental retardation to bone disease.
“As much as 120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released on an annual basis, including mercury,” says Richard Fuller, founder of Blacksmith, an environmental health organization based in New York City. “There are huge untreated dumps of industrial sludge.”
There may be a new roof on the New Orleans Superdome and tourists in the French Quarter, but time is not healing all wounds in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Even two years after the storm, mental health problems in the region are growing among the nearly 70,000 families still living in temporary housing provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The slow recovery, researchers and clinicians are finding, has bred levels of mental distress unseen in the aftermath of other disasters.
“Most of the time, distress emerges early and dissipates over the first year post-disaster,” says psychologist Fran Norris of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder at Dartmouth Medical School. Not so with Hurricane Katrina. One year after the storm a Harvard Medical School committee funded by the National Institute of Mental Health reported doubled rates of depression and anxiety in the region.
Mind-altering psychedelics are back–but this time they are being explored in labs for their therapeutic applications rather than being used illegally. Studies are looking at these hallucinogens to treat a number of otherwise intractable psychiatric disorders, including chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug or alcohol dependency.
The past 15 years have seen a quiet resurgence of psychedelic drug research as scientists have come to recognize the long-underappreciated potential of these drugs. In the past few years, a growing number of studies using human volunteers have begun to explore the possible therapeutic benefits of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, ibogaine and ketamine.
Feast and FamineThe special issue on obesity [“Feast and Famine”] did not adequately address the skepticism that has developed concerning health research. Too often we have been encouraged to, say, increase our consumption of broccoli or oatmeal, only to then be told that the initial claims were faulty or exaggerated. These inconsistencies often arise from the misapplication of the basic principles of scientific methodology. There is a chronic failure to select unbiased samples, to identify appropriate control groups, to employ reliable statistical techniques and to recognize that correlation does not necessarily imply cause. [More]
Very preterm infants who are fed human milk that is supplemented
with fatty acids show signs of improved intellectual development,
or “cognition,” at 6 months of age, researchers in Norway report in
the medical journal Pediatrics.
Men and women appear to differ in how they metabolize high levels
of fructose, a simple sugar commonly used to sweeten drinks and
foods.
People taking cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins may be
protecting their gums as well as their hearts, according to new
research from Finland.
For pregnant women diagnosed with major depressive disorder,
treatment with omega-3 fatty acid supplements may reduce depressive
symptoms, according to the findings of a small clinical trial.
Problem-solving therapy could also make a difference, study shows