I’ve written previously about how much I love listening to music when I run. I use a sweat-proof armband to hold my phone and listen blissfully to all the great music the world can offer. You can’t get much more inspirational than Little Chief’s Mountain Song! However, all this running and iPhone using means that I am also … Continue reading
Latest Entries
Where We Rank: Health and Wellness in Hartford, CT
The American College of Sports Medicine recently published the 2015 American Fitness Index, which they define as a “scientific snapshot of the state of health and fitness at the metropolitan level. The AFI data report measures the 50 most populous metropolitan areas in the United States and provides a score and ranking reflecting a composite of … Continue reading
An Apple a Day…
My colleague recently sent along an intriguing and fun research article. We’ve all heard the aphorism: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” And while it seems intuitively healthy and practical because fruit and vegetable consumption has innumerable health benefits, this colloquialism, like many, is not rooted in established scientific evidence. Until now. Authors from … Continue reading
Behind Those Pictures
Recently I read this ESPN article on University of Pennsylvania runner Madison Holleran, a star runner and student-athlete who struggled from depression and committed suicide in 2014 when she jumped from the 9th level of a parking garage. Suicide in young adults (ages 10-24), is the third leading cause of death, taking approximately 4600 lives/year … Continue reading
Simplifying our Rules
I recently read yet another research study finding that dietary sodium intake has very little effect on an individual’s blood pressure over time, in line with a growing body of evidence refuting dietary salt as an important factor in hypertension (except for a small portion of hypertensive adults who suffer specifically from salt-sensitive hypertension). Guidelines establishing quantifiable … Continue reading
Comfort Food Customs
No doubt about it, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream is my go-to staple when I’m feeling sad. Tonight Dough, Peanut Butter Half-Baked, Candy Bar Pie… well, you get the point. An informal survey of my friends, though, made me realize that we all reach for different comfort foods when emotional. So I took a quick … Continue reading
Tweeting our Happiness and Health
I previously wrote about the novel use of Twitter to predict geographic happiness, citing a study that used a geo-tagged data set of over 80 million words generated in 2011 on Twitter to estimate the happiest and saddest states (shown in red and blue, respectively, on the map). Authors describe their methodology as follows: “To measure sentiment … Continue reading
Find Your Number
I adjunct at University of Connecticut, so frequently use their online databases for journal research. Not so exciting, but necessary. However, I recently logged on to discover a new resource they’ve made available…Statista! For those of you who don’t know about it, this is a web-based portal that provides access to statistics on almost any … Continue reading
Estrogen, Blood Clots and Marathon Running
Marathon running is getting popular! It has increased 40% over the past decade, with 2013 yielding 1100 marathons and 541,000 finishers (57% men, 43% women). I’ve written before in several blog posts about our research at both the Boston Marathon and NU Hartford Marathon. We’ve been pursuing a line of research looking at whether the combination of air travel … Continue reading
Vegetable, Vegetable
While scrolling through the National Geographic March 2015 issue, I found a brief synopsis of a research article analyzing the effects that various diets have on our carbon footprint. Researchers estimated the global warming potential of various diets by weighting dietary components according to carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide produced during production, transport, storage, cooking … Continue reading
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