More Studies I Plan To Ignore

Sometimes I come across health studies that are perfectly legitimate... but they don't persuade me to do anything differently.

For example, there was that study that says raw broccoli is much better for you than cooked broccoli. Or another one that said room-temperature watermelon has more antioxidants in it than if it's refrigerated.

Well, I say the heck with those studies! I hate raw broccoli and like my watermelon cold and so I'm going to barely glance at the details.

However, if you are someone who likes warm watermelon or raw broccoli, these studies are not lame and ignorable, they are great discoveries! So I realize that one persons "health news" can be another person's "health snooze." (Sorry... that was really awful, wasn't it?)

So in the spirit of "I can't think of anything the least bit interesting to blog about today" "we're all different and isn't that wonderful," here are some recent studies that for various reasons, I didn't want to know much about but you very well might!

As it turns out, there are many different reasons to blow off health studies. So I've grouped these in Crabby-centric terms: why I didn't want to look much beyond the headline.

1. Because I know I'm Not Gonna Bother:

Cooking carrots before you cut them preserves about 25% more falcarinol, an anti-cancer compound, than if you cut the carrots first and then cook them.

Well, when I cook carrots it's mostly in soups or stews. And I do not want to start cooking the damn things whole and then fishing them out all hot and drippy and messy and then cutting them up. I'll just assume that that the sneaky little falcarinol stuff is now hiding in the soup. And if you scientists happen to know that it doesn't work that way? Don't tell me, ok?


2. Because I've heard the opposite thing too many times:

The New York Times Health Page has been torturing me lately with their "guess what, everything you ever heard is wrong" reports. Remember when they said exercise isn't all that good for you? Well, this one is equally annoying but more specific, and has to do with strengthening your core.

So you know how all the exercise experts always tells you the same thing: be sure to pull in your stomach as you work your abs. This is so that you can strengthen the "transversus abdominis" muscle which will help prevent back injuries.

In fact, exercise expert Rupal over at 101 Exercises just recently explained the importance of activating the deep abdominal muscles. And she's very convincing!

So now there's a smarty-pants New York Times article calling this into question. According to them: "There’s growing dissent among sports scientists about whether all of this attention to the deep abdominal muscles actually gives you a more powerful core and a stronger back and whether it’s even safe."

Well dagnabbit. I hate when exercise advice changes!

But to be fair, there are some good alternative core exercises they suggest, like side planks, bird dogs, very-very-modified crunches, and something called "stirring the pot." The video is pretty darn helpful as this stuff is hard to describe. (And thanks to reader Lulu for drawing this article to my attention!)

But I think my favorite source for Core Workouts? Still gotta be Bossy:


3. Because some new statistic pisses me off and/or depresses me.

A new study about teens and contraceptive use says that: "After major improvements in teen contraceptive use in the 1990s and early 2000s, which led to significant declines in teen pregnancy," contraceptive use declined between 2003 and 2007. And it's not because there's been any decrease in teen sexual activity.

"Teens are still having sex," one of the study's authors said, "but it appears many are not taking the necessary steps to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections."

The report suspects the reason might be faltering HIV prevention efforts and "more than a decade of abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education that does not mention contraception unless it is to disparage its use and effectiveness."

Which of course is what most of the health educators and experts predicted would happen. But we got federally funded "abstinence only" sex ed anyway.

I do not have a teen, so that's another reason for me not to spend too much time pondering the why's and wherefores. (And if I did, rather than take the high road and try to educate them myself, I suspect I'd send them over to the Midwest Teen Sex Show and let the fabulous Nikol school them on condoms and other sex ed topics. (Caution, graphic language and very NSFW).

4. Because it's a silly study.

Did you know that if you participate in a research study you think is about choosing colors, and the researchers offer you some soup for lunch, but don't tell you that they've rigged up your soup bowl to re-fill automatically...

...that you'll end up eating more soup than someone with a regular bowl?

Er... duh?

It's true that the people who didn't have sneaky self-refilling bowls had servers visibly refilling them, so the study does say something about how lame we are at telling just from our stomachs how "full" we are. But is this really a surprise???

And this study just seemed doofy on all kind of levels. Doesn't the whole "let's stop and have soup for lunch during our research study on colors" cover story sound kinda unconvincing? As a suspicious crab, I'd just assume they might be watching what I was eating and I'd try to control myself--though I suppose it would be the same weird artificial experience no matter which kind of bowl you had.

Anyway, I thought it was dumb use of research money. We haven't yet found cures for cancer and MS and all the other awful diseases out there. But we have money to rig re-fillable soup bowls to confirm the obvious fact that people use visual cues to tell them how much to eat?

Note: to add an additional embarrassing level of irrelevancy, this study was posted on the well-respected blog Cognitive Daily less than a week ago. But it turns out it's a rerun from 2007! Science blogs are allowed to have reruns? Crap! Why do I always notice the dates on studies after I write them up? Anyway, sorry, next time I'll check more carefully, and try to bring you recent silly studies, not old ones.


So, any studies or advice you've seen lately that you've chosen to ignore?

Post-Thanksgiving Mini-Roundup!

Why So "Mini?"
So it's traditional at Cranky Fitness to throw a few random links together at the end of the week--sometimes health-related, and sometimes... not so much. But as it's a holiday weekend, a lot of you may not actually be here reading this at all!

Instead you might be out braving crowded department stores in search of Perfect Christmas Gifts (muttering and sweating and cursing the lines, vowing that next time, you will simply use the handy search box of your favorite Amazon Affiliate). Or perhaps at this very moment you are in transit from a family visit, on an airplane--smiling serenely and reading a great novel, or downing cocktails from cute little miniature liquor bottles, or pulling your hair out in huge clumps as a sacrifice to the airplane Gods so that the plane won't crash--however it is that you choose to fly.

In any event, you may not be here. So this will be a much smaller bunch of randomness than usual. In fact, Crabby wasted a bunch of space apologizing last week for slackiness, which in retrospect, was totally jumping the gun.

But since these are great sites that could take some time to explore, fewer is better! And, coincidentally, way easier for the Crab to round up.


Word Power!
So first up is Free Rice, a totally addictive web site that Terrie from Women of Mystery featured on her blog. It's a vocabulary test, a learning device, and an easy way to donate to charity without actually spending any money. Got a great vocabulary and want to feel smug? Don't know any words and want to learn some? You can do all that while donating tiny grains of rice to hungry people! Of course you'd probably make even more of a difference by writing a large check--but, well, then you'd have to write a large check. Should that not be affordable, a few grains of rice are better than no grains of rice and it all adds up.

(And by the way--Terrie has a story featured in the mystery anthology "Murder New York Style," a compilation (available at Amazon) that looks awesome. If you're way behind on your reading like Crabby is at the moment, check it out and order it up for yourself or your favorite mystery buff for Christmas. (An ad would logically appear here now if Crabby could figure out how to do it (they've changed the instructions). But you can go to Women of Mystery or just type the title into the handy sidebar search box!)


Boomer Health & Silliness
So next is a cute little animated cartoon about baby boomers that Marijke found. And by the way, her health blog is packed with actual health information--something that has been scarce of late at Cranky Fitness.


More Teen Sex!
Already dreading all the wholesome family entertainment on tap for the holiday season? Encouraged by the news that Teen Sex may not be the Road Straight to Hell our parents warned us about after all? Well, for those of us who don't do much wholesome, here's a great viewing alternative: The Midwest Teen Sex Show.

Warning: oh, hell, do we really need a warning? It's a funny show about SEX! Dirty words are mentioned and some of the advice is sarcastic and twisted, though informative nonetheless. You can get it as a podcast or watch it on their site. And don't worry, there is something there to offend almost anyone, because it's HILARIOUS. (And thanks to Feministing for alerting us to the site).


Half-Naked Men!

And finally (speaking of wholesome), as a special present to one of our very favorite commenters, Holly*, Cranky Fitness directs your attention to Undies Drawer. Yes, it is--a whole website dedicated to Good Looking Men Posing in their Underwear!

And yeah, as you might expect, it seems pretty much gay. But lots and lots of Beefcake for admirers of the male physique, whatever gender those admirers may be.

*Note: Poor Holly made the mistake of mentioning once, in a comment, that the content-generated ads at Cranky Fitness were no longer featuring handsome men in their underwear. She is not, to our knowledge, battling any sort of male underwear ad-viewing addictions.

Hope you all are having a great weekend, wherever you may be!

Teen Sex Study: Surprise!

This is just a quick weekend toss-it-up-there post, but this study was just too interesting to pass up.

So if the newspaper articles are titled anything like this web story, are parents going to be hiding their local Journals and Couriers and Examiners and Independents for a few days?

Or are they going to clip out the articles and hand them to little Madison and Jason immediately so they won't miss finding out: "Early Sexual Activity May Curb Teen Delinquency."

Wow. This is not what everyone previously thought. In fact,we've been hearing pretty much the opposite all our lives.

So do you think the local school boards, PTA's, Church groups, social service organizations, etc, now armed with this new information, should start handing out condoms instead of anti-sex morality lectures? Hmm... that'll probably happen, lets see... when hell freezes over.

The study followed 534 same-sex twin pairs between 1994 and 2002, which would seem to filter out some of the confounding social and economic factors that you'd get if you just compared "kids who end up having sex early" with "kids who ended up waiting."

Said one of the study's authors: "There is a cultural assumption in the United States that if teens have sex early, it is somehow bad for their psychological health. But we actually found that teens who had sex earlier seem to have better relationships later. Now we want to find out why."

This being a Saturday, Cranky Fitness hereby absolves itself from checking out whether this was a peer reviewed study from a reputable source or something less reliable. (We will just note that it came out of the University of Virginia and was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence--but that the lead researcher is still a Ph.D. candidate.)

Cranky Fitness just liked this study, even though it did not, itself, "start early."

However, those of you who are the parents of teenagers may not find yourselves quite as amused and pleasantly surprised by this information, should it turn out to be true.

Any thoughts?