Discourse Chronicle

A recent study found that overweight and obese women needed to exercise about an hour a day, five days a week to sustain weight loss. The findings bolster what some health experts — and those who have lost weight and kept it off — have been saying for years: copious amounts of exercise and adherence to a strict diet are necessary to take off the pounds and keep them at bay. –Jeannine Stein

[Here is an example showing why people need to be aware of rhetoric in everyday living. The article claims 30 minutes of daily physical activity is not enough for sustaining weight loss and recommends an hour per day. The problem becomes clear with a closer look at the sample. Participants are females who are already overweight or obese, not average people considering losing a modest amount of weight, which I suspect is true for a majority of adults. BK]

category: Health, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

During an average follow-up of 19.6 years, 1,018 new cases of heart failure occurred. These included 362 of 6,995 participants who did not eat any cereal, 237 of 4,987 who ate one serving or less a week, 230 of 5,227 who ate two to six servings a week, and 189 of 4,167 who ate seven or more servings a week. -Judith Groch

category: Health    

Vicary and Fraley modeled their study on a 1979 Random House interactive fiction series, “Choose Your Own Adventure,” which allowed the reader to select from multiple options at critical points in the story. Each choice directed the reader to a new scenario.

This approach appealed to the researchers because earlier studies of individual behavior in relationships asked participants to make choices based solely on descriptions of isolated events. The sequential nature of the new study was more like an actual relationship, Vicary said, in that it involved ongoing interactions with the same partner.

[From Jerz’s Literacy Weblog. I found this finding particularly fascinating: “It is interesting that even when highly insecure individuals experience responses as a direct function of their actions, they are still relatively slow to adopt beneficial relationship choices,” the authors wrote. “It is possible that insecure individuals simply do not realize the detrimental impact that their actions have on their relationships.”

The reason is because after reading the first statement, it may be possible to understand its message as saying one cannot teach an old dog new tricks. However, taken together with the next statement the message changes into one that emphasizes how important communication is in a relationship. BK]

category: Health, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

Supersized portions and a lack of exercise may not be the only reasons for the spread of obesity in the U.S. A new study finds that having an obese friend makes a person 57 percent more likely to develop a bulging waistline too.

The effect was strongest for close friends but also occurred if friends of friends—or even their friends—gained weight, suggesting that obesity spreads as a kind of social contagion, the same phenomenon popularized in the 2000 book The Tipping Point as an explanation for fads from trucker hats to management philosophies. –JR Minkel

category: Health, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

Disney president and CEO Robert Iger told Ed Markey, that concerns raised by the lawmaker about cinema’s influence on underage smoking prompted the action. Disney also plans to place anti-smoking ads on DVDs of films in which the actors light up. –Brooks Boliek, Reuters

category: Health, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

While the study deals only with how much men and women talk, Mehl also found some robust sex-specific differences he plans to publish later. “Men talk about technology, sports and money. They use more numbers,” Mehl said. “Women talk about fashion, but also about relationships.” -Erika Gebel

category: Health, Rhetoric and Poetics    

In mice subjected to the equivalent of eating a pound of ice cream to get over some murine vicissitudes, blocking a well-known neuropeptide caused excess visceral fat to vanish, according to Zofia Zukowska, M.D., Ph.D., of Georgetown, and colleagues. -Michael Smith

category: Health    

Sifting through the genes of more than 38,000 people of northern European descent, researchers from a dozen institutions studied three varieties of the FTO gene: AA, AT and TT. They found people who had the AA version faced the greatest obesity risk, while those with the TT version had the lowest. –Frances Schwartzkopff

category: Health    

[I trekked over to Bed Bath and Beyond to purchase a memory foam mattress topper for my bed yesterday. I hoped Rebecca’s suggestion would finally solve my lower back pain problem when I sleep. I awoke this morning after at least 8 hours of sleep and realized I slept comfortably for the first time in over a year. Thanks, Rebecca. BK]

category: Health, Life    

[I am awake against my own free will at 4am and my alarm clock is set for 7am. No, I am not a PhD graduate student yet, so I am not reading for prelims or working on a dissertation or anything like that. Unfortunately, lower back pain is what keeps me up at night preventing me from sleeping well over the past year or so. Nothing I do helps this pain go away and it seems to be getting worse as I watch my hours of sleep become less and less over time.

I started working out my upper body a few weeks ago because my parents thought my pain is associated to weight after a magical 15lbs. found its way on me over the summer changing me from 130 to 145lbs. against 5ft. 5in. in height. I tried using a pulley traction system to straighten my spine for 15 minutes a day, but stopped because of potential hyperextension of my neck; I flipped my mattress; I tried buying a contour memory foam pillow; but none of them alleviate my pain. BK]

category: Health, Life