Headline News (Page 2,314)

If, like Dagwood, you feel the urge to creep into the kitchen late at night for a snack, don’t worry, you’re not making yourself fat.

Dr. Judy Cameron carried out tests on 47 female monkeys and found no link between when they ate and whether or not they gained weight. She made the discovery by accident, while studying the relationship between female hormones and weight gain. Her team surgically removed ovaries from 19 of them, inducing instant menopause. She found that the monkeys who no longer had the female hormones estrogen and progesterone started to eat more and put on weight. She says, “The absence of these hormones resulted in a 67% jump in food intake and a 5% jump in weight in a matter of weeks.”
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About the only regimen that is guaranteed to give you longer life is to continuously deprive yourself of enough to eat?at least it works for mice and fruit flies. People are now beginning to try this diet as well, although we will have to wait to see if it works for humans. Now scientists have discovered a hermit in India who says he hasn’t eaten or drunk anything for 20 years. He’s lived to be 70 and is in perfect health.
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We think of fresh vegetables as something that’s always good to eat, but they can be dangerous. Scallions imported from Mexico recently killed three people and made hundreds more sick. Grow your own? Research shows that vegetables grown in urban gardens can be contaminated with lead.

Marian Burros writes in The New York Times that in 2000, there were as many cases of food poisoning caused by fruits and vegetables as there were from meat, fish and eggs combined. This is due to an increase in imports from countries with lower sanitary standards, where fields are often irrigated with contaminated water.
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