Your Body Bits

Home-Cooked Health

 

Looking to lighten up your diet? Spend more time in the kitchen. According to a study in Public Health Nutrition, people who cook dinner at homeconsume less fat, sugar and calories than those who typically eat out. Here’s the breakdown:

 

	Percentage of Participants	Average Calories/Day	Average Fat/Day	Average Sugar/Day
Cooked dinner 6-7 times/week	48	2,164	81 grams	119 grams
Cooked dinner 0-1 times/week	8	2,301	84 grams	135 grams

 

Sidenote: That’s a lot of sugar! The World Health Organization recommends no more than 25 grams per day for an average adult.

 

Write It Down

 

 

If the performance season starts to feel overwhelming, write about it. The introspective, uninhibited kind of writing that people do in a journal has been shown to have a number of health benefits, from decreased stress to reduced symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, asthma and arthritis—plus an increase in overall quality of life. Does the blank page feel too intimidating? New apps make it easy. Check out Emojiary, which lets you record your mood with a daily text message using an emoji and words.

 

 

Pop quiz:

 

Which is the best way to learn choreography—by watching the steps or hearing instructions first? Researchers recently set out to find the answer by studying a group of students from the Palucca University of Dance in Dresden. In the experiment, the dancers learned a phrase first by sight, then heard spoken instructions (and were given time to practice). A second phrase was taught in the opposite order. When they were suddenly asked to repeat the movement 10 days later, the dancers more easily reproduced the phrase they had learned through observation first.