The Health Weblog
Find Out How You Stack Up:
Back in his awesome List-Show video for Mental Floss, John Green knocked out 25 facts on fitness.
Well one of the points he forgot to talk about was BMI.
He also missed out on body-fat & lean mass composition.
But he Did bring up another measure that is very helpful.
And it’s one that’s even better than BMI…
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Fast Progress In The Research World:
So just a few short years ago, civilians and celebrities all around the country rejoiced in good-natured bullying of their friends & colleagues.
And even though the premise was: either dump the bucket of ice water over your head or donate, many people went the torture-route anyway. -You know, for “fun”?
Despite this, that challenge raised $115 million dollars to fight the disease.
And then something amazing happened with a very small percentage of that money.
-The power of You did more than just fund something…
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Crowds To The Rescue!:
Health-tech darling & FDA sparring-partner 23&Me has just published a study that will make it unfortunately no easier to find excuses for your boss come Monday morning.
So, in the process of sequencing your DNA for things like potential diseases and national origins, etc. 23&Me also pulls down other data on you too.
And now, according to a self-reported survey of about 90,000 people, they’ve found another connection between genetics and behavior.
Because your genetic profile just might determine, in spite of you, if you are good at mornings or not.
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-Well maybe not quite that dire; but close. Read on:
The WHO recently put out a report that says basically All red meat, especially the smoked & salted stuff we seem to instinctively-love, is dangerous to your health and either Will or May cause colorectal, and possibly stomach, pancreatic, and prostate cancer.
This is almost exactly the same thing Harvard Medical School put out a few years ago, with very similar conclusions.
So to that end, here are a few things to think about:…
Like it or not, many factors like cheap storage are moving us toward Information Overload on a scale even Future Shock’s author could not have imagined.
Nowhere is that becoming more true than in Machine Learning and the Algorithmic-Pattern-Matcher-Meets-Server-Farm presently called, “Big Data”.
One of the first places outside Google and Facebook to have this problem? -Health Research.
The main issue with that much data is: How do you even begin to make sense of it?…
-Except this time, it just might work.
Everyone’s done this type of amateur Sherlock Holmes evaluation since they were born. But now, at the intersection of a facial-recognition technologist, a doctor, and Big Data, the studies might just prove both true and useful.
What Face My Age’s technology does…
A little while back, we told you about the great conference Wired put on with MDAnderson, called WIRED DATA | Life.
And one of the standout presentations of that conference was put-on by inveterate smartass, David Newman, of the site: The Number Needed to Treat.
Well, Wired has seen fit to remind us of David & Co-Founder Graham Walker’s work in a recent Science post.
What the NNT tries to do is take the highest-quality studies it can find and publish a ratings-system…
I have to admit I was F***ing FLOORED when Harvard released a study that basically says, “If you are within 6 Degrees of Ron Swanson’s bacon-suffused prevailing-wind-fart-contrail, you’re as good as dead.”
But the more I thought of it, the more it seemed like a case of what economists like to call “Statistical-Reacharound-Surprise”, than anything else…
