Researchers think Tom Yum Gung, a zesty Thai soup, might have cancer-fighting ingredients as well as good taste. Also called hot and sour soup, Tom Yum Gung is a shrimp soup with herbal ingredients like coriander, lemon grass, lime leaves and even galangal roots, a pungent root similar to ginger. A recent joint study by […]

There is no perfect diet for everyone, in spite of what you might have heard.  It seems the human body can adapt to almost any diet and survive, even thrive!  Consider the diet of the Inuit, the people indigenous to polar locations such as Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Theirs is a mostly meat diet, […]

Hospitals around the country are using music therapy as a way to ease a patient’s pain, lower blood pressure, and reduce anxiety and depression, allowing patients to heal faster. Thirty-five percent of healthcare facilities in the US offer music, of some form, to their patients. An article in the journal, Pain Physician, indicates ​that music functions […]

Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins are neurotransmitters that regulate our happiness.  A neurotransmitter is a messenger of neurologic information from one cell to another.  Being in a positive mental state has significant impact on our motivation, productivity, and wellbeing. Did you know you can intentionally cause neurotransmitters to flow? Let’s take a look at each […]

Maybe you’ve had JuJubes at the movies? The precursor to gummy bears, JuJubes are faux fruit flavored chewy candies that keep your dentist in business. The hot JuJube right now is actually Ziziphus jujuba, commonly called jujube, red date, Chinese date, Korean date, or Indian date. Mounting evidence shows the red date can protect us […]

In 2013, the most recent year for which we have data, there were about 2.8 million traumatic brain injury-related emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly two-thirds of concussions take place in children and teens and although most patients’ symptoms disappear within two […]

Over the years, researchers have tried to determine the cause of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.  Previously, researchers believed that amyloid was one of the proteins thought to cause the disease.  With new discoveries about the mysteries of dementia, there is a new culprit in the debate about what may cause dementia. Amyloid protein is thought […]

The Precision Medicine Initiative, a long-term research endeavor involving the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and multiple other research centers, aims to understand how a person’s genetics, environment, and lifestyle can help determine the best way to prevent or treat disease.  Last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) changed the initiative’s name to the […]

Scientists have talked for years about the impact global climate will have on our planet.  Some are even speculating that, at this point, there are some things that have happened as a result of the changing climate that are already irreversible. For example, mountain glaciers are in alarming retreat and the downstream effects of reduced […]

Recently, a technology that edits genomes was used in China to genetically modify pigs.  The result for the consumer would be pigs that are better adapted to cold weather while carrying around 24% less fat.  The technology, called CRISPR, an acronym for clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,  has two components. First, CRISPR is […]