Source: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2016/06/weekend-reading-science-nutrition-research/

I’ve just started getting a new Science and Research newsletter from William Reed: Informing Business Growth.

Some of the listings focus on dietary patterns or emerging microbiome research:

High-carb meals better in curbing appetite amongst the obese: Study: Foods high in carbohydrates may help promote better short-term appetite control than high-fat foods, a nutritional study has revealed. .. Read
CVD prevention strategies should focus on eating more ‘good’ foods, not avoiding ‘bad’ foods: Greater consumption of foods found in the Mediterranean diet may be more important for prevention of heart disease and strokes than avoidance of ‘unhealthy’ processed foods, a new study finds. .. Read
3 years, 3 countries, 222 children: Big gut data tracks impact of hygiene on microbiome Gut microbiome development in the early stages of life may explain the rise in autoimmune diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a study reports.  .. Read
Crowdsourcing control: Don’t make it a free for all, warn researchers: With momentum building for crowdsourcing and funding as a platform for nutrition research, scientists warn that greater control may be needed to safeguard the quality and validity of such studies. .. Read
Gut flora composition linked to health, diet, and lifestyle, pioneering population study reveals: In one of the first population-wide studies on gut flora variation, a distinct link between gut bacteria and health, diet, and lif…

Source: http://www.theminimalists.com/wow/

By Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus · Follow: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

What a month! We just finished our Minimalism Documentary Tour 2016—bringing Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things to more than a dozen cities across North America—and we were blown away by the response.

Not only did every event fill the rafters, but we saw immense diversity among the crowds: high schoolers and grandmothers, executives and factory workers, stay-at-home dads and single parents. Everyone on every spectrum was represented, and they all shared one thing in common: they’re all striving to live a meaningful life.

You can find some of the photos from our tour on Instagram, and you can listen to a few of the live, post-movie Q&A sessions on our podcast.

Updates

With the tour in the rearview, here are some updates about the documentary…

Whoa. We received news from Gathr, the film’s distributor, that, after its first week in theaters, Minimalism is officially the number one documentary of 2016 (the largest U.S. box office opening for a documentary so far this year). Yay! Thank you for your eagerness, enthusiasm, and support. And thank you for sharing this film with the people you care about most. With your help, our simple-livi…

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/NqXjbCL5gnc/

“Love isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” ~Steven Hayes

Things go wrong in life. Distress and confusion can take root, sometimes leading to harsh self-criticism, depression, or anxiety.

We sense that love heals, and it does.

I once visited an orphanage for abandoned infants, and every toddler who I carried clung tightly to me. I can still feel their little arms clasping me desperately.

We crave love as we crave oxygen.

But what is love?

Is it something you wait for?

What if love is more than a feeling?

What if your choices and actions can bring the spirit of love to life?

Love has many shades and nuances. Here are some forms of love that you can start creating today.

Love as patience

I used to be obsessed with outcomes. A perfectionist intolerant of failure, I was constantly trying to prove my worth. This made me unpleasant to others, and to myself.

One day our little son was running around noisily while I tried to concentrate. Irritated, I put an arm out and he crashed into it. He started crying, and I felt deep shame.

I resolved to change. I’d been sacrificing what made life worth living: relationships, health, talents, and even family happiness. I’d been neglecting everything and everyone, including myself…

Source: http://www.theptdc.com/2016/06/9-ways-to-make-clients-workout-set-harder-more-intense/

Selecting the appropriate resistance for your clients is a very important part of personal training.  If you go too light, the client will not make the necessary physiological adaptations to respond to the training.  If you go too heavy, the workout might be too hard, frustrate them, or worse, hurt them.

Trainers should have some readily available tools in their toolbox to crank those working sets to the proper intensity for their clients.

Sometimes we may choose a weight we believe to be a challenge for our desired rep range, but it turns out to be a little too easy for the client. In most cases, we could simply add more reps, but it’d be more useful to keep the same weight, yet just incorporate some techniques that make your client’s workout set harder and more intense.

ALSO READ –> 10 Coaching Tips to Help Beginner Clients Reach Their Fitness Goals

There are nine techniques I want to share, but before I get to them, a couple of notes:

If you cue your client during a set, keep them short and concise. If you need to provide a long, detailed explanation of what he should do, instruct while your client is resting in-between sets. Otherwise, give them the necessary instruction of what you expect before they begin.

For example, you might say, “I want you to complete 10 reps of …

Source: http://summertomato.com/wisdom-wednesday-stop-checking-nutrition-facts

Photo by Enokson

Most people don’t believe me when I say I remember learning about mitosis in 5th grade, but I do.

And I’m not talking about the kind of remembering where I vaguely recollect learning *of* it. I was fascinated by the stages of prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telephase, and couldn’t believe that our chromosomes did such a beautiful dance every time a cell would divide.

I mean, have you seen it?

In high school, biology was always my favorite subject. I even took an extra class in physiology just for funsies.

And after dicking around as an English major for a few years at Berkeley I ultimately graduated with a degree in molecular and cell biology. (I won’t tell you the kinds of grades I got in my MCB classes, because you’d hate me.)

That’s how much I love biology.

As you can imagine, this kind of devotion to the microscopic secrets of the human body added plenty of fuel to the fire of my dieting obsession.

Calories, carbs and fat counts? Couldn’t get enough of ’em. I had piles of notebooks filled with each sinful and virtuous molecule I consumed, and took an embarrassing number of nutritional supplements.

Had the Quantified Self movement been around back then, I would …

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/02/480192692/solved-the-mystery-of-the-bearded-chickens?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=thesalt

When you’ve got it, flaunt it: Beards can occur in various chicken breeds. The birds in the middle have them, the ones on the far left and right don’t.

Courtesy of Ying Guo

Move over, human hipsters, you’re not the only ones growing outrageous facial hair.

For years, farmers have noticed that some chickens have tufts of elongated feathers around their face and beak, making it appear like they had grown a beard. The cause of the feather beards was a mystery. Now, thanks to scientists in China, the mystery of the bearded chicken has been solved.

The answer appears in a study published in PLOS genetics on Thursday. Chinese scientists compared the DNA of bearded chickens to non-bearded chickens. The results led them to investigate a gene, HOXB8. Bearded chickens had multiple copies of HOXB8 and surrounding genes. Non-bearded chickens only had one copy of HOXB8.

…

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/GzlZBSjbCBw/

“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.” ~C.S. Lewis

Have you ever been cruising down the highway of life only to unexpectedly hit a major pothole that completely threw you off? Maybe you lost a job, ended a relationship, or were betrayed by a friend.

It’s easy to wonder “why did this happen to me?” and stay buried in the pothole. It’s up to us to break free and regain our cruising speed on our life journey. Easier said than done, right?

I hit a major pothole in my professional life that blindsided me and left me feeling alone and unsure of what to do. Through this experience, I learned a lot about getting out of the pothole and getting back to living my fullest life. Let me start by telling you a little about my journey to the pothole.

The Rise

I grew up very much an academic, excelling in school all the way through the ranks of getting a Ph.D. in Operations Research (which is essentially applied math).

After that final graduation, I went off into the work force to put all of my newly learned skills, tools, and techniques to work. I worked as an analyst directly for two US federal agencies and also at a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC)…

Source: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2016/06/open-for-comment-the-fdas-new-guidance-for-voluntary-salt-reduction/

Yesterday, the FDA opened for public comment its long-awaited guidance for industry about reducing salt in processed food products.  The guidance affects about 150 products.  It gives baseline data for those products and sets targets for salt reduction.

Please note that I am using the word salt, not sodium.  The targets are for sodium reduction.  Most dietary sodium comes from salt added to processed foods and pre-prepared foods.  Salt is 40% sodium.  The target dietary intake of 2300 mg sodium comes to just under 6 grams of salt a day, which is not particularly low.  It is, however, lower than current intake levels.

In a blog post, FDA official Susan Mayne said the link between sodium intake and blood pressure is “strong and well documented,” but

In fact, it’s very difficult in the current marketplace NOT to consume too much sodium. The average intake today is over 3,400 milligrams—significantly more than the 2,300 milligram limit recommended by federal guidelines. And it’s not just adults who are eating too much sodium: Children and teens consume more than is recommended.

Vox, for example, provides a terrific chart on the amounts of sodium in foods.  It starts with this:

Susan Mayne goes on to explain that

the FDA assessed the sodium con…

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/4FQcMY6YIVI/

“No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That’s the only way to keep the roads clear” ~Greg Kincaid

How is it that some people can breeze through physical and emotional pain, whereas others wince at the mere thought of it?

Is it their genes? Their individual circumstances? Their support network?

Or is it a certain strength of character, something each and every one of us can develop with the right tools and training?

Two years ago I found myself needing to answer these questions.

I was sitting in a cafe in East London wiping the tears from my cheeks with a napkin. To my boss who’d just informed me she no longer needed me, it would’ve looked a little overdramatic. But at least an hour had passed since she’d left.

It was uncertain whether or not I’d be paid the previous month’s wages. I needed it to cover last month’s rent, to buy food for the following weeks, and now to call my mom. I’d moved to London only a month prior, giving up a good job and a bright future in a good company to work on a new, small but promising community project.

Despite the words of warning and concern from my family, I believed this was going to be the start of something great. Those tears were not for losing the position or even a month’s worth of har…

Source: http://zenrockfitness.com/2016/05/thank-nova-zen-rock/

I can’t believe that I have become a cliché-yet time and again I find myself saying things like “I have never felt better” or “I haven’t looked this good since college”.  College-that was a husband and two kids ago and over the years since college, between work, carting the kids around everywhere, and all the other millions of things that take up our time, I found myself having changed dramatically and not for the better.

Then-to get back to the clichés-I had that “aha moment” where I was looking at some family photos from a barbecue we had over the weekend and came to a picture of me sitting at the table.  I wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t gorging on cake or eating ribs, I was just sitting there.  Yet I was shocked at how little the person in the picture matched the picture of myself in my mind. That is when I decided I had to do something.  But what?  I had joined gyms in the past, but always had excuses not to go or not to stick with it.  I had never been one for dieting, I didn’t think my eating habits were that bad.  So what to do?

I had passed the Zen Rock sign many times on my way into Redmond and that line “personal training” always stuck with me so I decided to check them out.  I was immediately impressed both with the facility and the staff.  From the first day of my training, I have never been the same!  I met with Nova and we discussed my goals, plans, and how to get me to where I wanted to be.  She didn’t pu…