It’s not exactly news that obesity is a huge issue in the US. In 2015, 30% of adults were considered obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). On top of that, Boston University School of Public Health sheds a new light on this extremely serious issue.

After analyzing national data from 1988 to 2014, researchers found that 51% of American men and 52% of American women have been obese at some point.

“The results suggest that a much larger fraction of the population is affected by obesity than is reflected by statistics on current weight status alone,” the researchers wrote.

Obesity is a really serious issue as it is tied to heart disease, poor mental health, chronic pain, and cancer. It is really important for those who suffer from it to eliminate completely the risk for certain health risk.

Obese people risk getting heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and liver diseases every day. So it is extremely important to fight this phenomenon and make sure than less and less Americans suffer from obesity every year.

Americans love dairy products. It’s no surprise that staple meals of the American diet are comprised of Mac n cheese and pizza. And, while foods such as these are clearly drenched in the presence of dairy, many other popular foods of the American diet such as ice cream, chocolate, milk, yogurt, some soups, bake mixes, and sauces all contain some amount of dairy. These foods are consumed by the majority of Americans every single day.

Therefore, it is interesting to note that according to the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse, about 30 to 50 million Americans are lactose intolerant. Cornell recently published a study that links lactose intolerance to people whose ancestors were not primarily from places where dairy herds were raised safely, such as in Europe.

The study elaborates on this implication saying that because people who had really available, safely made, dairy available to them were the people who developed an ability to digest milk, whereas people whose ancestors came from Africa or Asia where dairy was not as readily available, lost the ability to digest lactose.

Another interesting example of why this may be the case is that people of Northern European descent tend to retain the ability to produce the enzyme lactase and can healthily drink milk all their life while about 60 percent of people with primarily African and Asian descent stop producing lactase as they mature.

And while the population of Americans appears to be largely lactose intolerant, there is not a foreseeable future of America getting rid of all dairy products.  So, for the time being, if you find yourself having mostly negative responses to dairy containing foods, don’t feel bad. Many people are lactose intolerant. Luckily, there are some pills on the market to help aid dairy digestion.

The best diet is a varied one, one that has fruits, vegetables, proteins, carbs all together. Despite that, the latest trend is to avoid certain food categories to loose weigh as fast as possible. For instance, some diets suggest to eat proteins only avoiding carbs at all costs. We have found out what happens to your body when you do that.

The less serious results are a bad mood and a bad breath. When we stop eating carbs, we use the energies we accumulated in the past that are kept in our body as “emergency,” in case of need. Once we run out of “extra energies,” we are actually more hungry and want to eat more than we used to before we started the diet. So we start loosing and putting up weight, going up and down on the scale weekly. We loose weight fast but we gain more even faster. If we eat too much proteins we also risk damaging our kidneys to the point that we could get kidney stones. Besides those serious effects, this kind of diet can cause insomnia and food poisoning. From now on, do some research before starting an extreme diet!

All new residential buildings in the US state of California must be equipped with solar panels, while fifty-percent of the state’s electricity should come from carbon-free sources by 2030, California Energy Commission has been quoted as saying.

 Experts have calculated that these new requirements will reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the same degree as if 115,000 cars have been taken off the roads.

This move certainly seems like some good news amid growing concerns about climate change. But there are still questions to be answered. Here is what the average Californian should know about the local government’s ambitious plan.

The 2019 Energy Efficiency Standards mandates that new buildings must have better insulation and better ventilation, and requires energy-efficient lighting for commercial and buildings. The document also encourages the use of demand-responsive technologies that allow residents to store the extra energy that their solar-powered homes generate and use it over a longer period of time.

Builders in California now have two options – they can either add panels to individual homes or create shared power systems for residential complexes. These energy-efficient homes will still rely on the traditional grid for power supply at night. Also, homes whose location does not allow enough sunlight will be exempt from having solar panels installed on their roofs.

If approved by the Building Standards Commission by the end of this year, the new requirements for solar panels on residential buildings in California will come into force on January 1, 2020.
 

Tattoos might be unhealthy. So far, it was believed that if you were able to keep the area clean and avoid infection, there wasn’t any concern about your health. However, a new report by some researchers might prove something different. According to this studies, tattoos leave lasting impacts on your physiology, specifically on your lymph nodes, a piece of your immune and circulatory systems.

Scientists were able to analyze nanoparticles of ink from a tattoo that had been deposited in nearby lymph nodes. What they found is incredible: as it breaks down, the ink is transported and stored within the body.

If the tattoo artists are not using high-quality ink, it could be a very serious issue. “When someone wants to get a tattoo, they are often very careful in choosing a parlor where they use sterile needles that haven’t been used previously,” one of the study’s authors said. “No one checks the chemical composition of the colors, but our study shows that maybe they should.” Tattoo inks contain toxic materials such as chromium or nickel.

The issue is that all of these pigments eventually are either broken down or steadily move further into the body until they are deposited in the lymphatic tissue.

“We already knew that pigments from tattoos would travel to the lymph nodes because of visual evidence. The lymph nodes become tinted with the color of the tattoo,” said one of the researchers. “It is the response of the body to clean the site of entrance of the tattoo. What we didn’t know is that they do it in a nano form, which implies that they may not have the same behavior as the particles at a micro level. And that is the problem—we don’t know how nanoparticles react.”

It’s not exactly news that obesity is a huge issue in the US. In 2015, 30% of adults were considered obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). On top of that, Boston University School of Public Health sheds a new light on this extremely serious issue.

After analyzing national data from 1988 to 2014, researchers found that 51% of American men and 52% of American women have been obese at some point.

“The results suggest that a much larger fraction of the population is affected by obesity than is reflected by statistics on current weight status alone,” the researchers wrote.

Obesity is a really serious issue as it is tied to heart disease, poor mental health, chronic pain, and cancer. It is really important for those who suffer from it to eliminate completely the risk for certain health risk.

Obese people risk getting heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and liver diseases every day. So it is extremely important to fight this phenomenon and make sure than less and less Americans suffer from obesity every year.

Americans love dairy products. It’s no surprise that staple meals of the American diet are comprised of Mac n cheese and pizza. And, while foods such as these are clearly drenched in the presence of dairy, many other popular foods of the American diet such as ice cream, chocolate, milk, yogurt, some soups, bake mixes, and sauces all contain some amount of dairy. These foods are consumed by the majority of Americans every single day.

Therefore, it is interesting to note that according to the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse, about 30 to 50 million Americans are lactose intolerant. Cornell recently published a study that links lactose intolerance to people whose ancestors were not primarily from places where dairy herds were raised safely, such as in Europe.

The study elaborates on this implication saying that because people who had really available, safely made, dairy available to them were the people who developed an ability to digest milk, whereas people whose ancestors came from Africa or Asia where dairy was not as readily available, lost the ability to digest lactose.

Another interesting example of why this may be the case is that people of Northern European descent tend to retain the ability to produce the enzyme lactase and can healthily drink milk all their life while about 60 percent of people with primarily African and Asian descent stop producing lactase as they mature.

And while the population of Americans appears to be largely lactose intolerant, there is not a foreseeable future of America getting rid of all dairy products.  So, for the time being, if you find yourself having mostly negative responses to dairy containing foods, don’t feel bad. Many people are lactose intolerant. Luckily, there are some pills on the market to help aid dairy digestion.

The best diet is a varied one, one that has fruits, vegetables, proteins, carbs all together. Despite that, the latest trend is to avoid certain food categories to loose weigh as fast as possible. For instance, some diets suggest to eat proteins only avoiding carbs at all costs. We have found out what happens to your body when you do that.

The less serious results are a bad mood and a bad breath. When we stop eating carbs, we use the energies we accumulated in the past that are kept in our body as “emergency,” in case of need. Once we run out of “extra energies,” we are actually more hungry and want to eat more than we used to before we started the diet. So we start loosing and putting up weight, going up and down on the scale weekly. We loose weight fast but we gain more even faster. If we eat too much proteins we also risk damaging our kidneys to the point that we could get kidney stones. Besides those serious effects, this kind of diet can cause insomnia and food poisoning. From now on, do some research before starting an extreme diet!

All new residential buildings in the US state of California must be equipped with solar panels, while fifty-percent of the state’s electricity should come from carbon-free sources by 2030, California Energy Commission has been quoted as saying.

 Experts have calculated that these new requirements will reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the same degree as if 115,000 cars have been taken off the roads.

This move certainly seems like some good news amid growing concerns about climate change. But there are still questions to be answered. Here is what the average Californian should know about the local government’s ambitious plan.

The 2019 Energy Efficiency Standards mandates that new buildings must have better insulation and better ventilation, and requires energy-efficient lighting for commercial and buildings. The document also encourages the use of demand-responsive technologies that allow residents to store the extra energy that their solar-powered homes generate and use it over a longer period of time.

Builders in California now have two options – they can either add panels to individual homes or create shared power systems for residential complexes. These energy-efficient homes will still rely on the traditional grid for power supply at night. Also, homes whose location does not allow enough sunlight will be exempt from having solar panels installed on their roofs.

If approved by the Building Standards Commission by the end of this year, the new requirements for solar panels on residential buildings in California will come into force on January 1, 2020.
 

Tattoos might be unhealthy. So far, it was believed that if you were able to keep the area clean and avoid infection, there wasn’t any concern about your health. However, a new report by some researchers might prove something different. According to this studies, tattoos leave lasting impacts on your physiology, specifically on your lymph nodes, a piece of your immune and circulatory systems.

Scientists were able to analyze nanoparticles of ink from a tattoo that had been deposited in nearby lymph nodes. What they found is incredible: as it breaks down, the ink is transported and stored within the body.

If the tattoo artists are not using high-quality ink, it could be a very serious issue. “When someone wants to get a tattoo, they are often very careful in choosing a parlor where they use sterile needles that haven’t been used previously,” one of the study’s authors said. “No one checks the chemical composition of the colors, but our study shows that maybe they should.” Tattoo inks contain toxic materials such as chromium or nickel.

The issue is that all of these pigments eventually are either broken down or steadily move further into the body until they are deposited in the lymphatic tissue.

“We already knew that pigments from tattoos would travel to the lymph nodes because of visual evidence. The lymph nodes become tinted with the color of the tattoo,” said one of the researchers. “It is the response of the body to clean the site of entrance of the tattoo. What we didn’t know is that they do it in a nano form, which implies that they may not have the same behavior as the particles at a micro level. And that is the problem—we don’t know how nanoparticles react.”