Clean Labels

"For over a decade consumers have become finely attuned to E-numbers, flavourings, colourings and additives in our food. Food manufacturers have changed the way they do things in pursuit of 'clean label' - a more natural sounding ingredients list. But do we fully understand the new processes involved, the terms used and how safe they really are?

Sheila Dillon talks to Joanna Blythman, in her first broadcast interview about her new book 'Swallow This' in which she investigates some of the processes involved in making products taste and look good and last longer and her concerns about the ingredients and the secrecy that often surrounds them. We hear reports from food development teams about how they find new ways to produce food and ask the regulators if we can be sure they're safe."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b053zsn1

A New Level of Archery

Lars Andersen: a new level of archery:

http://youtu.be/BEG-ly9tQGk

Want to Stay Slim?

....then eat fat!  This film by Britsh Pathe is from 1958.  In response to this being a new theory, Dr McArless (?) responds,

• "Yes, it's new now, today, but it wasn't new in history.  In the days when we had no agriculture and there was no starch in our food, no potatoes, no bread, no cereals, everybody had to live by hunting on meat and fat and in those days, I believe, that they were all slim.  Now if we stop eating these new foods, so called, then we will get our weight down back to normal....stop eating starch and sugar.  Eat everything else, as much as he likes, and he will get slim but it will not make him more slim than he should be."

At 3'20" fasting even makes an appearance!

Whatever your diet dogma, this will make you think.  Now let me go place an order for some 'Slimmo'!

Lunchtime Walk

Assuming that you are NOT on the diet wagon (you should have had your diet dialled in long before now - and you KNOW what foods you should be emphasising in your diet), and assuming you've also got your training sorted (ditto the above), here is something that continues to fulfil its promise; walking:

• Physical activity may regulate affective experiences at work, but controlled studies are needed and there has been a reliance on retrospective accounts of experience. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of lunchtime walks on momentary work affect at the individual and group levels. Physically inactive employees (N = 56; M age = 47.68; 92.86% female) from a large university in the UK were randomized to immediate treatment or delayed treatment (DT). The DT participants completed both a control and intervention period. During the intervention period, participants partook in three weekly 30-min lunchtime group-led walks for 10 weeks. They completed twice daily affective reports at work (morning and afternoon) using mobile phones on two randomly chosen days per week. Multilevel modeling was used to analyze the data. Lunchtime walks improved enthusiasm, relaxation, and nervousness at work, although the pattern of results differed depending on whether between-group or within-person analyses were conducted. The intervention was effective in changing some affective states and may have broader implications for public health and workplace performance.

You might want to trick out your walk by taking in a countryside route.  Other strategies involve random urban exploration (seek out shortcuts and unexplored roads and pathways in your locale or select a known destination and try to walk a different route to it) which maintains novelty, and, mixing up the duration of your walk over fixed periods of time.

Podcasts offer another distraction to escape immediate surroundings on a walk.

"North-Korean Documentary - Western Propaganda"

A thought provoking mockumentary on our consumerism and mendacious political class.

http://youtu.be/WEGMJE6I_Q4

English Rituals

England's strange winter rituals http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-29742774 via DuckDuckGo for Android

The Medication of Wildlife

There is plenty of evidence that many medicines widely prescribed and in use today have dubious pharmacological benefit.  Ben Goldacre's Bad Science has done much to illuminate this otherwise secretive world which is driven largely and solely by profit, whilst persisting on the premise of "trust me, I'm a doctor" rather than sound science.