SportsGeezer

Your Workplace and Your Weight

Is it fair to blame your job for the extra pounds on your butt? Probably. After all, even Steve Madden, editor in chief of Bicycling and Mountain Bike magazines says the culture of his workplace influences his weight. So, however, does his love for wine. See what Madden and two others interviewed by the New York Times have to say about the intimate relationship between workplace and weight.

Finally, Competitive Yoga

Type A readers will be pleased to learn that finally, they can practice yoga and win. Writing in the Washington Post, Rita Zeidner interviews competitive yoga champ Sonya Wyche, who will represent the D.C. area in the upcoming 2008 Bishnu Charan Ghosh Cup in Los Angeles. What does she say that's interesting? Before each competition, Wyche, who is a nephrologist, drinks coconut water, because it gives her a healthy dose of potassium without  the sugar that comes in sports drinks.She also has two oranges.
Read more in the Washington Post.

The Scientific American: More Activity=Slower Aging

Just listen for a minute: When researchers at King's College in London examined the genetic markers of biological aging of some 2,400 twins, they found that a comparison of  the subjects who exercised the most (an average of 199 minutes weekly) to those who worked out the least (a mere 16 minutes or less a week) suggested that the exercise mavens were on average as much as a decade biologically younger than the slackers. The Scientific American reports on the study, which focused on the length of telomeres, and which was published in Archives of Internal Medicine.  Sciam reports that the scientists speculate that stress, inflammation and oxidative stress (cell damage caused by oxygen exposure) may be responsible for shortened telomeres in physically inactive people.
Read more in the Scientific American.

Judy Foreman Sings the Unsung Benefiits of Weight Training

After years of doing just about every kind of exercise but weight training, Boston Globe health writer Judy Foreman now promises to change her ways. Why? In this piece, Foreman gives us five good reasons:
1. The evidence for the value of strength training has grown so much that last year, the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association issued new recommendations for healthy older adults that stressed emphasized the importance of weight lifting.
2. Strength training dramatically increases muscle mass. More muscle mass is good not just because it makes you stronger but because it increases basal metabolic rate — muscle cells even at rest burn more calories than fat cells.
3. Weight training also gets results fast — it only takes resistance training twice a week for a few weeks to begin to see a significant effect, compared with three days a week with aerobics.
4. People with greater muscle strength may be less likely to develop metabolic syndrome.
5. A Danish study just published last week showed that strength training aimed at shoulder and neck muscles can diminish the chronic neck pain that many people get from working of at computers.
Wait, there's more: Read more from Judy Foreman in the Boston Globe.

Really Low Culture: Is Yogurt Really Good for You?

Everyone knows that somewhere high in the mountains of Eurasia there is a people who eat nothing but yogurt and live to be several hundred years old. Or something like that. Now Dannon, "the top-selling brand of yogurt worldwide" is trying to take such legend to the bank, and it is running into a couple of obstacles, like a class action lawsuit arguing that health claims made in the company's advertisements for its Activia and DanActive products are bogus. Writing in her health blog, Well, in the New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope talks about the squabble, and tries to find some evidence that "probiotic" food--food with live organisms- really does more good than food without live organisms.
"Although the scientific evidence shows that probiotics really can help," writes Parker-Pope, "questions remain about how well that research translates into the real world, where some marketers may add untested amounts of the bacteria to various foods. While there are thousands of different probiotics, only a handful have been tested in clinical trials and been shown to deliver specific health benefits when eaten regularly."
Read more in Well.

Yoga Comes to the Office: Please Foward to HR

Cynical readers will read this piece in the Boston Globe about corporations bringing yoga classes to the office and zero in on the reason for the "largess": healthier, happier employees are more productive. Practical readers will send the link to the story on to their HR departments. What will you do?
Here's the link.

Bodibeat Matches Music to Heart Rate

No longer must we humans struggle to make our heart rates match the music we hope to exercise to.  Yamaha, the New York Times reports, has turned the tables and delivered an MP3 player that plays tunes in sync with our heartbeat. The paper reports that the new Bodibeat works in four modes: workout, fitness, training and a standard music-playing mode. The mode automatically matches your music with your heartbeat — slow down and you might get some smooth jazz; speed up and you get grunge — while the other two modes play music at a brisk tempo.  The amazing new machine, the Times reports, comes with a set of electronic beats or can pull music from your own collection.
Read more about Bodibeat in the New York Times.

Posture Check

Posture, from the Latin "positura," position, says a lot about one's position, in more ways than one. Want to know what your position is? Check this handy visual aid from the Washington Post. Then straighten up and fly right, from WWII military lingo, popularized in song by Nat King Cole's 1943 release "Straighten up and Fly Right."

Sushi? Hold the Tuna

For a little over a year now, Geezer's loving wife has declined to eat tuna sushi, generously offering all tuna slices to her grateful husband. Now he knows why. A New York Times study of tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants found so much mercury that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency. The New York Times reports that sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. Experts consulted by the paper warned that while these samples were gathered in New York City, similar results would likely be observed elsewhere.
Read more in the New York Times.

Exercise Eases Arthritis

Want to know why it's a bad idea to let arthritis pain keep you from exercising? Because a recent study conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that exercise may actually ease the pain of arthritis. The Washington Post reports on the research, which followed 346 people with self-reported arthritis. Some were assigned to a group that followed the Arthritis Foundation Exercise Program, consisting of basic and advanced exercise classes twice a week for an hour a week for eight weeks. Others were put in a control group that did not take part in the exercise program. After eight weeks, people in the exercise group showed significant improvements in pain, fatigue and managing arthritis. The pain and fatigue improvements were still evident six months after completing the exercise program.
Read more in the Washington Post.