Hey everyone. I would love to say I had a busy week, but it is was mostly spent trying to stay cool or me trying to get over headaches all week. Since the weather has been all over the place this past week, my body just isn’t digging it. Luckily the temperature seems to be mellowing out a little more (keeping between 70 and 80) so I won’t be roasting all day. Though I am not sure if the humidity will be going down this week.
I am sure there was fun and exciting things I was going to share with everyone today, but I am more concerned with trying to get my to-do list done for today. So I will just jump into the links.
A scientist’s love story with the eccentric and largely unknown peacock spider
This was a pretty interesting story about a man who has been filming and photographing the peacock spider, bringing it forward into popular science. He has even discovered new species, but isn’t being formally paid to do the research, talking about doing what you love.
Most of us misunderstand metabolism. Here are 9 facts to clear that up.
I think these are great facts to commonly misunderstood concepts about metabolism. Some of which falls under the whole “speed up your metabolism” section that we hear often in blogs and fitness books. I am not going to say these are bad suggestions, like building more muscle, or eating more raw foods, but it isn’t altering your metabolism.
The FDA just made the most significant changes to the nutrition label in years
I love the idea about listing sugar in two ways- added sugar and natural sugars. I hear so many people who get confused about the idea of sugars, like me explaining to my boss on several occasions that you don’t need sugar for bread to rise since there is natural sugars in the flour for the yeast. I don’t eat too many pre-packaged foods, but it is always something good to be paying attention to.
Exercise Research is Ignoring Female Athletes
Add this to stats I just don’t get. I feel like women are more likely to fit exercise in their daily routines than men. But I guess when we look at athletic research we think the people who are going to benefit are professional athletes, which makes majority of the population think of men. This is bad.
11 Angriest Cities in America
Okay so this is a fairly click-baity article but I couldn’t help but love it. I just that I am from New Jersey so I have a lot of anger, or that my humor is fueled by irritability. My life has centered around two major cities- New York City and Philadelphia and surprise! Both cities have ranked on this list. I do have to say the “anger” is different from both cities, though I feel like Philadelphia is clearly the worst as it seems almost completely sports based (hello Phillie riots!)
Mary Ellen @ VNutrition
That spider is so cute! Well cute especially b/c it’s not crawling around my house but still cute.
We were discussing the new food labels in my nutrition class this week. I like that they have added “added sugar” to the label b/c it wasn’t clear before. Though I do wish they would differentiate between sugars like natural fruit juice and high fructose corn syrup as they are both listed as added sugars. Oh well, it’s a start. I mostly tell people to look at the ingredient list but I appreciate the FDA trying to make things like servings more predominate as well as separating the types of fat. I was thinking of doing a blog post on this soon if I ever get enough time to focus on it!
Jennifer
I kind-of prefer they keep a lot of those different sugars under the same umbrella, but then again I might get frustrated fast once I start finding foods that have both refined sugar and natural fruit juice together. I think the added sugar thing gets most confusing with fruit based desserts, like mango yogurt or ice cream has SO MUCH sugar. But I always wonder how much is actually added?
kimmythevegan
Ah! That spider is so incredibly cute! I always love hearing about people doing things they are passionate about things – how awesome is that =)
They are changing the nutrition labels? Very cool. Sugar seems to be a very confusing thing for people. I sometimes feel like it’s just easy for some companies to hide things in nutrition labels.
I find it annoying as someone who could be considered “athletic” that there isn’t much research with regards to women.
Jennifer
Yeah women’s athletic studies are frustrating. I like to read Fitness RX from time to time and you do refer to studies that are done just on women, but the studies are so small- like 20 participants. They usually point that out too which I like. But it does bring to attention that they do find differences between males and females like apparently women do better with 30 second intervals (HIIT training) while men do better with tabata intervals.