There’s been a lot of noise lately about fructose and high fructose corn syrup. Diet and weight loss gurus are vilify the sugar. The corn syrup industry has come back with their own list of arguments at sweetscam.com, insisting that all the dietary opinion and news in the world just doesn’t exceed their financial need to sell sugar.

The industry site (run by the front organization Center for Consumer Freedom) makes claims that sucrose (table sugar) and fructose are metabolically equivalent and that there is no difference between consuming the two. The site makes heavy use of the word “moderation” to soften their claims but is metabolic equivalence really true?

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Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have done some research on mice with Type II Diabetes. The good news: resveratrol, the same anti-aging compound in grapes and red wine, lowers insulin levels even on a high fat diet. The bad news: because “resveratrol does not cross the blood brain barrier efficiently,”they had to inject resveratrol directly into the brains of those mice to do it. Researchers hope this will lead to the development of resveratrol-like compounds designed to work specifically on the brain.

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Last year Albert Lea, MN began a project in healthy eating, healthy living, and community building called the “Vitality Project“. The plan included building sidewalks and bike trails, changes in restaurant menus and supermarket specials, encouraging kids to walk to school in large supervised groups and employers setting aside exercise breaks. And the results: in addition to a greater sense of community, “Organizers say the first-of-its kind experiment added an average 3.1 years to the longevity of about 2,300 residents who calculated their lifespans by answering 36 lifestyle questions.”

What could you do with 3.1 extra years?

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This review is a little longer in coming than many of the reviews of Shaun T’s Insanity that you’ll find online. Why? We actually worked all the way through this routine before commenting at all.

Beachbody instructor Shaun T, the mastermind behind Hip Hop Abs, has produced what the company claims “may be the hardest workout ever put on video.” The principle was simple: build a 60-day workout plan around the hardest, most demanding interval workout routine they had ever offered. To be commercial the program had to be approachable, to be effective it had to be hard.

We have written about interval training before. The idea is that short periods of high intensity exercise followed by a period of recovery increasing the efficiency of the overall exercise. That’s the science, what about the program? Read the rest of this entry »

Research keeps finding more benefits to regular exercise. Just yesterday, we have 3 news items reporting 3 ways exercise is good for people. While two are admittedly specific to people with particular medical problems, one applies to everyone.

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