Saturday, May 4

SOCIETY

Try These 6 Underprescribed Lifestyle Medicines For A Better, Longer Life But They Don’t Come As Pills
No Comments
SOCIETY

Try These 6 Underprescribed Lifestyle Medicines For A Better, Longer Life But They Don’t Come As Pills

The majority of Americans are stressed, sleep-deprived and overweight and suffer from largely preventable lifestyle diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes. Being overweight or obese contributes to the 50% of adults who suffer high blood pressure, 10% with diabetes and additional 35% with pre-diabetes. And the costs are unaffordable and growing. About 90% of the nearly $4 trillion Americans spend annually for health care in the U.S. is for chronic diseases and mental health conditions. But there are new lifestyle “medicines” that are free that doctors could be prescribing for all their patients. Lifestyle medicine is the clinical application of healthy behaviors to prevent, treat and reverse disease. More than ever, research underscores that the “pills” today’s physici...
Read More
Do You Really Want To Know? – This Calculator Will Guess How Many Healthy Years Of Life You Have Left
No Comments
SOCIETY

Do You Really Want To Know? – This Calculator Will Guess How Many Healthy Years Of Life You Have Left

As the old saying goes, the only things certain in life are death and taxes. While death is inevitable, the quality of life you experience until death is often within an individual’s control. This is what our team at the Goldenson Center for Actuarial Research chose to focus on by developing a rigorous measure of quality of life. How many healthy years of life do you have ahead before you become unhealthy? Everyone understands the benefits of living a long healthy life, but this also has implications for industry and society. Medical costs, financial planning and health support services are directly related to the state of health of an individual or community. We call this measure of quality of life “healthy life expectancy” and its complement “unhealthy life expectancy.” We define ente...
Read More
Millennials Drive For 8% Fewer Trips Than Older Generations
No Comments
SOCIETY

Millennials Drive For 8% Fewer Trips Than Older Generations

Millennials – typically defined as those born between 1981 and 1996 – have gotten a lot of press, both positive and negative. Some argue that they are more public-spirited and less materialistic than baby boomers. Others say they are spoiled and entitled. Still others write that they are the same as earlier generations, but younger and with lower incomes. CC BY-ND Understanding how millennials behave has important practical implications for urban planning, industry evolution and climate change. For example, if millennials prefer to take a Lyft and skip the hassle of driving and parking, this could spell big changes for the automobile industry. But if their suburban soccer mom phase has merely been delayed, not skipped entirely, perhaps nothing will really change. We are scholars of busin...
Read More
Life Without Facebook: The Anti-Social Media Experiment
No Comments
SOCIETY

Life Without Facebook: The Anti-Social Media Experiment

  What that really means is getting off Facebook. While I have accounts on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, I rarely visit those sites. But Facebook is different. For some reason, even when I vow not to visit, it draws me in. Calls to me. Compels me to log in and browse my feed. And yet when I do, more often than not I walk away aggravated, not inspired. So why do I keep going back? I'm not sure, but it's definitely time to step back and re-evaluate. I joined Facebook in 2007 to keep an eye on my daughter when she went away to college. In 2008, like many other business owners, I began using it to market my business. I began amassing a huge friends list, accepting friend requests from everyone who sent me one. For awhile everything was hunky dory. Until it wasn't anymore. I'm not e...
Read More
How ‘Karen’ Went From A Popular Baby Name To A Stand-In For White Entitlement
No Comments
SOCIETY

How ‘Karen’ Went From A Popular Baby Name To A Stand-In For White Entitlement

When I read about Amy Cooper, the woman in Central Park who called the police on a black birder because he’d asked her to leash her out-of-control dog, I was horrified. But, as a sociolinguist who studies and writes about language and discrimination, I was also struck by the name given to Cooper in several headlines: “Central Park Karen.” On Twitter, the birder’s sister also referred to her as a “Karen.” There was no confusion about what this meant: It was a label for a white woman who had used her privilege to threaten and try to intimidate a black man by calling the police. But this was just one way “Karen” has been deployed in recent months. There was the woman dubbed a Karen who, after being told that a waiter would bring ketchup to her table, ended up helping herself at the server’...
Read More
Is Chocolate The Temptation Of Sin
No Comments
SOCIETY

Is Chocolate The Temptation Of Sin

Temptation lives across the street in a two story contemporary building where the chocolatier resides. His passion and zest for cocoa makes his heartstrings sing. His lust for creating passion drives him each day back into the boiling cauldrons. Melting and mixing the exquisite aromas flutter into the air wafting out into the streets below. Mouths salivate as their nostrils pick up the sweet scent sliding by on the airfoils of the day. Imaginations fire up pondering the delicate treats the chocolatier has conjured up for the display. He has no menu but there are plenty of pictures hanging around taunting and teasing every patron's brain. The cocoa is mixed, pounded and patted, melted and shaped, then sprinkled, and swirled until it is molded into chocolate treats. The treats come out ...
Read More
Research Shows Family Rifts Affect Millions Of Americans – Here Are Possible Paths From Estrangement Toward Reconciliation
No Comments
SOCIETY

Research Shows Family Rifts Affect Millions Of Americans – Here Are Possible Paths From Estrangement Toward Reconciliation

Family relationships are on many people’s minds during the holiday season as sounds and images of happy family celebrations dominate the media. Anyone whose experiences don’t live up to the holiday hype may find this difficult or disappointing, but those feelings may be felt even more acutely among those involved in family rifts. I have done a significant amount of research on ambivalence and conflict in families, which led to a five-year study of family estrangements. At the outset, I was surprised at how little evidence-based guidance exists on the frequency, causes and consequences of family estrangement, or how those involved cope with the stress of family rifts. There are few studies published in academic journals on the topic, as well as limited clinical literature. I sought to fil...
Read More
Small Towns And The Global Pandemic How They Are Responding
No Comments
POLITICS, SOCIETY

Small Towns And The Global Pandemic How They Are Responding

Before the global pandemic hit, small towns across America were dealing with struggling economies, aging roads and bridges, and declining populations. The coronavirus added new challenges, like additional demand for limited hospital beds for an aging population, many of whom have chronic health conditions. Fortunately, as I’ve seen in my work at the Small Town Center at Mississippi State University, small towns have the advantage of being more nimble and responsive to crisis than cities, largely because they have fewer regulations and more opportunities to be creative about problem-solving. The pandemic has increased local leaders’ attention to their residents’ health – not just in terms of doctors and hospitals but also identifying new ways to help people get fitter, spend more time ou...
Read More
No Haven In Family Courts For Victims Of Domestic Abuse
No Comments
SOCIETY

No Haven In Family Courts For Victims Of Domestic Abuse

The #MeToo movement may have shifted the balance of credibility on sexual abuse and harassment at work more toward victims and away from alleged perpetrators. But the same cannot be said regarding men’s violence and abuse at home: In fact, women’s reports of domestic violence are still widely rejected, especially in one critical setting: the family court. When women, children or both report abuse by a father in a case concerning child custody or visitation, courts often refuse to believe them. Judges even sometimes “shoot the messenger” by removing custody from the mother and awarding it to the allegedly abusive father. For instance, courts reject 81% of mothers’ allegations of child sexual abuse, 79% of their allegations of child physical abuse, and 57% of their allegations of partner a...
Read More
Here’s The Evolutionary Explanation Of Why Cat And Dog ‘Moms’ And ‘Dads’ Really Are Parenting Their Pets
No Comments
SOCIETY

Here’s The Evolutionary Explanation Of Why Cat And Dog ‘Moms’ And ‘Dads’ Really Are Parenting Their Pets

Shelly Volsche, Boise State University A pup out for a stroll, without paws touching the ground. Shelly Volsche, CC BY-ND Have you noticed more cats riding in strollers lately? Or bumper stickers that read, “I love my granddogs”? You’re not imagining it. More people are investing serious time, money and attention in their pets. It looks an awful lot like parenting, but of pets, not people. Can this kind of caregiving toward animals really be considered parenting? Or is something else going on here? I’m an anthropologist who studies human-animal interactions, a field known as anthrozoology. I want to better understand the behavior of pet parenting by people from the perspective of evolutionary science. After all, cultural norms and evolutionary biology both suggest people should focus on...
Read More