Food should bring pleasure and satisfaction, but eating in excess often also brings unnecessary calories, which can lead to unwanted weight gain. Use these simple tactics to limit your caloric intake while still enjoying your meals.   

1. Choose fiber-rich fruits and vegetables for appetizers, eat high-calorie foods sparingly, and avoid dishes high in saturated fat and sodium.
2. Be aware of what you eat. To help prevent overindulging focus on the act of eating don’t watch television, surf the Internet or indulge in other distractions. And eat slowly; it takes 20 minutes for the stomach to signal the brain that you are full.
3. Don't starve yourself all day to justify eating more at dinner. Eating a satisfying breakfast can ward off the temptation to overindulge later in the day.
4. Get up from the table when you're done, in order to avoid nibbling.
5. Once your meal is over, take a walk to help digest your food and think about what a wonderful meal you just had.

Brain Metaphors

Posted: 23 Sep 2008 12:57 PM CDT

Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoffrey makes an astute observation about how the latest consumer technologies have a way of becoming metaphors for the mind. Before the brain was a binary code running on three pounds of cellular microchips, it was an impressive calculator, or a camera, or a blank slate. In other words, we're constantly superimposing the gadgets of the day onto the cortex. Geoffrey notes that a recent article featured on the BBC on fMRI scans of taxicab drivers ("Taxi drivers have brain sat-nav") is very similar to an earlier study, except that the most recent article used satellite navigation as a metaphor for the spatial memories storied in the hippocampus:

It's interesting to note, meanwhile, that this appears to be an almost complete retread of news released more than eight years ago. There we learn not only that "the hippocampus is at the front of the brain," but that it "was examined in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans on 16 London cabbies."

Cabbies' brains, that article reports, "'grow' on the job." However, it's also interesting to speculate here that "sat-nav" was not referred to by that earlier article because certain technologies - such as dashboard navigation and handheld GPS - simply had not yet reached an adequate price-point, or the required level of social acceptance, for "sat-nav" to be useful to that writer as a metaphor. If this were true, then perhaps you could track the infiltration of GPS and sat-nav technologies into the fabric of everyday life by the speed with which they have become recognizable as urban-spatial metaphors.

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Variation in Caesarian section deliveries

Posted: 23 Sep 2008 07:08 AM CDT

I was born by Caesarian section at a time when this method of delivery was fairly rare (too long ago to even mention). The reason was placenta praevia. Both my children were C-section births, too, both for good medical reasons. My daughter has now had two C-section deliveries. These data might lead some to think that C-section deliveries is hereditary but not so, unless you consider national residence to be heriditary (which it is but in a non-biological sense). I say this because the overall rate of Caesarian section deliveries is not astoundingly high (more than 25% of all live births in 12 industrialized countries; in the US it's 30%). But looking at the countries themselves one sees huge differences, with nearly 40% in Italy and Mexico versus only 14% in The Netherlands. Here's a comparison, courtesy CDC:

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