Drinks as bad as drugs
It's time to cut down on fizzy drinks. New research indicates that they are as bad for your teeth as drugs. The study is based on the experience of woman in her 30s. She drank two litres of diet fizzy drinks daily for three to five years and experienced tooth decay similar to that suffered by a 29-year-old methamphetamine addict and a 51-year-old habitual crack cocaine user, reports femalefirst.co.uk. “The key part of this research is the fact the damage was caused by frequent consumption of fizzy drinks,” said Nigel Carter, chief executive of the British Dental Health Foundation. Carter pointed out that frequent consumption of sugary drinks is unhealthy for mouth.
Happiness comes with age
Do people get happier or crankier as they ageIJ Scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and the results have been conflicting. Now a study of several thousand Americans born between 1885 and 1980 reveals that well-being indeed increases with age — but overall happiness depends on when a person was born. Previous studies that have compared older adults with the middle-aged and young have sometimes found that older adults are not as happy. But these studies could not discern whether their discontent was because of their age or because of their different life experience. The new study, published online, teased out the answer by examining 30 years of data on thousands of Americans, including psychological measures of mood and well-being, reports of job and relationship success, and objective measures of health.
Elders can trust easily
The older people get, the more trusting they become — a tendency that can be dangerous because it puts elders at risk for exploitation and abuse. But why does it happenIJ A new study suggests that older people have trouble identifying untrustworthy faces because of an age-related drop in activity in the anterior insula, a brain region that may play a role in assessing trust and risk. Researchers at the University of California, los Angeles, asked 119 adults who were at least 55-years-old and 24 younger adults to look at pictures of faces that exhibited either trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy qualities (according to previous analysis). Compared with the younger subjects, the older participants were much more likely to label the suspicious faces as credible and approachable.
Why kids learn fastIJ
Kids are wildly better than adults at most types of learning — most famously, new languages. One reason may be that adults' brains are “full,” in a way. Creating memories relies in part on the destruction of old memories, and recent research finds that adults have high levels of a protein that prevents such forgetting. Whenever we learn something, brain cells become wired together with new synapses, the connections between neurons that enable communication.
Weight issues
Women who suffered severe physical or sexual abuse as children are much more likely than others to develop a food addiction, researchers say. Because women with food addiction are more likely to be overweight, the study authors suggested their findings could shed light on potential causes of food addiction and obesity, and lead to improved treatment strategies. More than one-third of American women experienced some form of physical or sexual abuse as children or teens, according to the study. Some studies have suggested that the resulting stress drives these females to eat sugary, high-calorie “comfort” foods.