Eclectic Living
Bariatric surgery often helps people lose weight - just ask Al Roker. But it turns out the weight loss associated with bariatric surgery may have less to do with having a smaller stomach and more to do with how the surgery permanently changes one's gut microbiota. A new study found that people who have undergone bariatric surgery... Continue Reading →
A few years ago I embarked on a three-day fast after reading a Harper's article by Steve Hendricks, Starving your way to vigor (sorry, you have to subscribe to Harper's to read it), about the many potential health benefits of fasting. I wrote about my experience on the Mr. Money Mustache blog. It was a fun challenge; enough... Continue Reading →
Food is a problem for a good chunk of the planet. There are over 800 million undernourished people in the world, and millions more that have other forms of malnutrition. According to Mark Bittman, the problem is more one of poverty than of a lack of food. Maybe this is true, but almost all of the potential... Continue Reading →
2014 was the year of self-tracking for me. I created a mood tracking spreadsheet (download it for free), to which I also added my data from MyFitnessPal. Now the results are in, and what they reveal will shock you (not so much). The primary purpose of building my mood tracking contraption was to see which variables in my life... Continue Reading →
I like me some Dutch people. I lived in Holland for half a year back in the '90s for a "study" abroad during college. Mostly I just drank beer and played soccer and ate Chinese food with my Dutch roommate Huub ("Wil je chinees" he would ask me: "Do you want to Chinese?" I always... Continue Reading →
As visitors to the Cottage are aware, we like to get dirty. Another thing we like is the potential that crowdsourced science has to rapidly improve our knowledge. Here's an opportunity to combine the two. The Natural Products Discovery Group is offering free soil collection kits, which they will then analyze for fungal compounds that... Continue Reading →
Mice have occasionally entered the Cottage (both figuratively and literally), but the current study was one in which mice were not being poked and prodded (or stretched, as the case may be).* The gist of this study (and I'm sure you've already heard about it on Facebook or The Huffington Post) is that somebody measured 15,521... Continue Reading →
Our heroic little fuzzy friends, mice, have taken another one for the team (our team, not theirs). Scientists recently fed mice a diet of emulsifiers commonly found in many of our processed foods. Turns out these emulsifiers may be emulsifying the mucus lining that protects our gut lining. This could be via direct action or... Continue Reading →
It appears the folks at the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee have been frequenting Poppa's Cottage, and taking our advice to heart (so to speak). Their new guidelines have finally eased some of the former restrictions on fat and cholesterol, and have more harshly implicated simple carbs and sugar (a.k.a. yayo) in our growing (literally) health... Continue Reading →
"I think we have reason to believe that the mind is equipped with a battery of emotions, drives, and faculties for reasoning and communicating, and that they have a common logic across cultures, are difficult to erase or redesign from scratch, were shaped by natural selection acting over the course of human evolution, and owe... Continue Reading →
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