Living Well

What's causing our kids to become autistic, fat, near-sighted and sleep deprived?

TV!  This latest study found that watching TV lowers melatonin levels which can create all sorts of nasty side effects in children.  This study (as others) linked TV watching in kids to:

• autism
• obesity
• trouble sleeping
• eye problems
• lower melatonin levels
• early puberty

In adults, "the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease increases with each extra daily hour of television viewing among people aged 20 to 60."

Watching TV must give people immense pleasure ... otherwise I can't imagine why they would expose themselves and their kids to so much of it. We spend nine months of pregnancy trying to eat right, drink no alcohol, get all sorts of prenatal tests and then we plop our toddlers down in front of another round of SpongeBob or Thomas the Tank Engine without a second thought.

Why human stress affects our health

Sapolsky studied baboons to find out why humans stress over non-physical threats and how that affects our health.  As he points out, a zebra stresses for three minutes and then it's dead or safe.  We stress for hours and days and years over psychological factors like jobs, debt and relationships.  This affects our health.  As Sara Goudarzi writes:

"If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult-onset diabetes and high blood pressure,” Sapolsky said.

“If you're chronically shutting down the digestive system, there's a bunch of gastrointestinal disorders you're more at risk for as well."

So deal with that stress!  Either solve the problem or find positive aspects to balance it out.

Think exercise whether you exercise or not!

Thinking you are getting enough exercise might be beneficial to your health whether or not you actually do get enough exercise.  Housekeepers who all got the same amount of exercise just by working during the day were divided into two groups.  One was told that they were getting enough exercise at work to see health benefits.  The other group was told nothing.  At the end of a month the group that was told they were exercising enough saw more health gains than the other group!  They had lower body mass indexes, lower blood pressure and lower body fat.  The researchers attributed it to the placebo affect.  I bet just the fact they were now thinking about their movement as exercise might have also caused them to move more.

Photo by Mirando.

Kids get fatter if they don't sleep

We know that in order to lose weight easily, you need to get enough sleep.  If your body doesn't get enough sleep, it tries to commensate by getting more energy from food.  Now they've proven the same thing with children - "kids who get less sleep weigh more":

Children who get less sleep tend to weigh more five years later