This just in, from the Department of Dumb Logical Fallacies: your face is going all droopy, and your electronics are to blame:

Our growing reliance on smartphones and laptops is elongating our faces into jowly, sagging messes, according to cosmetic surgeons and other beauty pundits. They've even come up with a suitably distressing name for this phenomenon: "Smartphone face."

You read that right: "Smartphone face." The condition is evidently characterized by sagging jowls, double chins, and "'marionette lines,' those vertical creases that run from the corners of the mouth towards the chin." As evidence for the widening epidemic, The Week cites the astonishing rise in chin surgeries that's gripped the developed world in recent years. Chin implants are a $38 million-a-year industry, and last year alone, surgeons performed one mentoplasty every 25 minutes.

Judging by the exploding popularity of chinjobs, screen-induced droopiness must be a clinical ailment worthy of our collective alarm!

To which we say: really?

While the mentoplasty numbers are indeed factual, it's hard to say the same for the rest of it. So much of this smells completely wrong. Let's start with the fact that counting chinjobs has got to be the worst way of proving the existence of a health condition, much less assessing its prevalence. The popularity of a surgical procedure -- a cosmetic procedure, at that -- does not a diagnosis make.

Leaning on the surgery statistics is problematic for a related reason: it doesn't rule out other explanations for mentoplasty. It could be that people always had slightly saggy chins but didn't realize it until they started looking at their Google Hangout reflections all the time (who am I kidding? I meant Skype, of course). Or maybe the peculiar way in which we look down at our devices, combined with the eerie glow of our screens, combine to create a visual illusion of disfigurement. Or perhaps chin surgeries are spreading like wildfire for no other reason than that everyone else seems to be getting them -- so why not me, too?

Then there's the reddest red flag: the guy who's warning the world about this new threat is -- you guessed it -- a cosmetic surgeon. Given that there's no public health risk associated with looking down (that we know of, knock on wood), that leaves altruism and the economic motive as the only two realistic factors that could explain the surgeons' urgent exhortations.

And if you're still concerned, you can at least rest easy knowing you won't end up like this.

Eating foods that are high in saturated fat -- red meat, butter, and other animal products -- clog your arteries and increase your risk for heart disease and stroke. Until now, that's all we thought they did. Now it seems that saturated fats may also be linked to how efficiently our brains work.

In a paper published today in Annals of Neurology, a team of scientists analyzed dietary data from 6,000 women over age 65. Over the course of a four-year monitoring period, women who consumed more saturated fat scored worse on cognitive function tests than those who ate less of the stuff.

What's more, women who ate healthier types of fat, such as the monounsaturated fats found in olive oil, actually showed improvements in their test results. The findings suggest that swapping one kind of fat for another may not only improve your cardiovascular health, but may also enhance your brain function. That's particularly important for middle-aged adults who may be at risk for Alzheimer's, dementia or other degenerative brain disorders.

"The total amount of fat intake did not really matter, but the type of fat did," said Olivia Okereke, the study's lead researcher. "Substituting in the good fat in place of the bad fat is a fairly simple dietary modification that could help prevent decline in memory."

The study drew data from the Women's Health Study, a 10-year clinical trial of 40,000 women aged 45 and up -- so it looks like the jury's still out for men.

Most people know the feeling of dragging yourself out of bed in the morning and feeling wiped out periodically (or chronically) throughout the day. Many of us even have trouble falling asleep at night, as it seems harder and harder to put the cell phone down or turn off the computer.

Researchers have come up with a new term for our skewed sleep-wake cycles: Social jet lag. And it could be responsible for more health issues than just feeling tired from time to time.

People who were more socially jet lagged were more likely to have higher body mass indices (BMIs) than others.

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Social jet lag refers to the fact that the schedules we keep are fundamentally out of sync with our internal clocks, which, along with the sun's movements, cue us to wake and sleep at certain times of the day.

It's a 24/7 world, and by staying up late, spending more time in darkness, we delay our bodies' clocks. More and more evidence is linking the disruption of our internal or biological clocks to serious mental and physical health problems. The researchers found that in 70% of the population, biological and social clocks differ by more than one hour.

"We have identified a syndrome in modern society that has not been recognized until recently," said study author Till Roenneberg in a news release. "It concerns an increasing discrepancy between the daily timing of the physiological clock and the social clock. As a result of this social jetlag, people are chronically sleep-deprived." Sleep-deprivation itself has been linked to insulin resistance, heart disease, and earlier death.

When you sleep, as opposed to how much you sleep, may be the real key.

The authors of the new report looked at data over a 10-year period, and chronicled participants' sleep schedules and certain body measures, like weight. They found that people who were more socially jet lagged were more likely to have higher body mass indices (BMIs) than others. What's interesting is that the relationship between social jet lag and BMI was separate from sleep duration, suggesting that it really is whether our clocks are out of sync rather than how long we sleep that's to blame.

Roenneberg also points out that social jet lag is a fairly recent development in human history. Humans' schedules may have started shifting with the advent of the light bulb, but says, "[w]aking up with an alarm clock is a relatively new facet of our lives." The results of the study may add substance to the idea that kids might be better off if school started a little later.

It may seem more efficient to spend time working or catching up on chores (or TV) than sleeping, but that's rarely the case. "Good sleep and enough sleep [are] not a waste of time but a guarantee for better work performance and more fun with friends and family during off-work times," said Roenneberg. Going to bed a little earlier - and not sleeping through your alarm - is probably a simple change that could have big consequences on your energy level, long term health, and, of course, on your weight.

The study was carried out by researchers at the University of Munich, and published in Current Biology.

This article originally appeared on TheDoctorWillSeeYouNow.com, an Atlantic partner site.

PROBLEM: Several studies have linked parenting to reduced happiness. In 2004, for instance, much attention revolved around a paper in Science showing that working mothers in Texas enjoy parenting less than watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. Do parents really find little joy in raising their kids?

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METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by S. Katherine Nelson looked into the correlations between parenting and well-being. They conducted three trials: a large, nationally representative survey to explore whether parents are happier overall than non-parents; a week-long experience-sampling experiment to periodically check whether parents feel better on a moment-to-moment basis than non-parents; and individual episodic surveys to examine whether parents experience more positive feelings when taking care of their kids than during their other daily activities.

RESULTS: Age and marital status appear to influence parental happiness. Moms and dads who were older and married tended to be happier than their childless peers -- an association absent among most single or very young parents. Interestingly, fathers in particular expressed greater levels of happiness, positive emotion, and meaning in life than their childfree counterparts; and their scores were also more consistent than the mothers' scores.

CONCLUSION: Parents experience greater levels of happiness and meaning from life than non-parents.

IMPLICATION: Parenthood comes with relatively more benefits than drawbacks. Co-author Sonja Lyubomirsky notes in a statement, "We are not saying that parenting makes people happy, but that parenthood is associated with happiness and meaning.

SOURCE: The full study, "In Defense of Parenthood: Children Are Associated With More Joy Than Misery," is published in the journal Psychological Science.

I've been asked to comment on the HBO series, Weight of the Nation and everything that comes with it: the accompanying book, the auxiliary videos, the distribution plan to schools and other institutions, and the Institute of Medicine's report, Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention.

Because I wanted to look at all of it before commenting, plenty of others have beaten me to it, among them FoodandTechConnect's infographic summary, Kerry Trueman on AlterNet and Michele Simon on Grist.

I don't have HBO but got sent the press kit, the Weight of the Nation book, the disks, and the IOM report. I watched all four hours of the HBO series, plus the "Rethinkers" video of kids working on a school lunch project in New Orleans (air dates), plus the IOM and HBO books, plus the website.

Overall, Weight of the Nation makes the size, scope, causes, and consequences of obesity alarmingly clear.

The talking heads -- many of them my friends, colleagues, and former students -- all had plenty to say about what obesity means on a day-to-day basis for individuals and its personal and economic cost to society.

The programs ought to convince anyone that obesity is a big problem and that something big needs to be done to prevent it.

But doing something big, the series makes clear, will be very difficult.

This may be realistic, but it is not inspiring.

We need inspiration. That's why I wish the programs had focused as much on social responsibility as they did on personal responsibility.

I wanted to see the programs take leadership on how government can help citizens reduce the social, economic, and business drivers of obesity.

That kind of leadership exists. To see it in action, watch the video of the New Orleans school "rethinkers." Those kids wanted to improve their school lunches. They got busy, dealt with setbacks, and learned how to make the system work for them. They "spoke truth to power" and "held feet to the fire."

Why aren't adults doing the same? Politics, the IOM report explains. Although one of its principal recommendations is critical -- Create food and beverage environments that ensure that healthy food and beverage options are the routine, easy choice -- its recommendations speak some truth to power but do little to hold feet to the fire.

The IOM report explains the political realities:

The committee's vision takes into account the need for strategies to be realistic, as well as consistent with fundamental values and principles. At the same time, however, having a diversity of values and priorities among them is itself a principle of U.S. society.

Potentially competing values and principles must be reconciled, for example, in considering protections needed for individuals versus the community at large or for the public versus the private sector.

Vigilance regarding unintended adverse effects of changes undertaken to address the obesity epidemic is also needed.

"Americans," the report says, are accustomed to the current obesogenic environment, one "driven by powerful economic and social forces that cannot easily be redirected."

It may not be easy to redirect such forces, but shouldn't we be trying?

In 1968 the CBS documentary Hunger in America galvanized the nation to take action to reduce poverty and malnutrition.

The HBO series was equally shocking but I wish it had focused more on how we -- as a society -- could mobilize public distress about the poor quality of food in schools and the relentless and misleading marketing of sodas and junk foods that it so well documented.

But dealing with the need to address the social and economic forces that promote obesity would, I'm told, be considered lobbying, which the private-public sponsors of the series are not permitted to do.

Mobilizing public support for health is considered lobbying. Food industry marketing is not.

FoodNavigator-USA.com columnist Caroline Scott-Thomas wrote about the HBO series:

As an industry journalist, I'll be among the first to admit that industry is stuck in a very hard position here: On the one hand, it wants to be seen to be doing the right things - but on the other, what people say they want to eat, and what they actually do eat are often very different, and after all, food companies are in the business of making money.

But honestly, could industry do more to make healthy choices routine, easy choices? I think so.

Yes it could, but won't unless forced to.

Without leadership, we are stuck doing what the food industry needs, not what the public needs.

Weight of the Nation did an impressive and compelling job of defining the problem and its causes and consequences. I wish it -- and the IOM -- could have risen above the politics and pressed harder for strategies that might help people make healthier choices.

But -- if the HBO programs really do help mobilize viewers to become a political force for obesity prevention, they will have been well worth the effort that went into making and watching them.

This post originally appeared on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.

The United States is unique among developed nations in the extent to which it has resisted a government-run health care system. Nevertheless, it has often been said that the United States has the most heavily regulated health care system in the world. What does this mean?

In fact, our health care delivery and finance systems are mixed public and private. Health care professionals practice independently or in groups, while hospitals and other health care facilities are privately owned (although most are at least nominally "non-profit"). About thirty percent of Americans are publicly insured--primarily through Medicare and Medicaid--but public programs are often administered by private insurers. Sixteen percent of Americans are uninsured, but most of the rest are insured through employment-sponsored insurance, heavily subsidized through tax expenditures to the tune of roughly $200 billion a year.

Both our delivery and financing systems are heavily regulated. Moreover, not only are our delivery and financing systems a public-private mix, so is our regulatory system. Hospitals are regulated primarily by The Joint Commission, a private entity founded by and still dominated by physician organizations. Hospitals and physicians must comply with the utilization and payment rules of many different private insurers.

Health care regulatory programs are imposed for many reasons, but four reasons stand out. First, many programs are justified as necessary to address well-understood market failures. The minimum coverage requirement (individual mandate) in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), for example, was enacted to discourage "adverse selection"--the tendency of only unhealthy people to buy health insurance if insurers must accept all applicants. Pharmaceuticals are regulated because few consumers have the information or ability to assess their safety or effectiveness. Second, we regulate because we are using private delivery and financing systems to accomplish public goals. Because the ACA relies on private insurers to cover uninsurable individuals, it prohibits health status-based underwriting. Federal law requires private hospitals to provide emergency care regardless of the ability of patients to pay, because Congress has been unwilling to provide a tax-funded public program to pay for it. Third, regulatory programs exist because we are paying for privately provided care and insurance using public funds, and must ensure that public funds are properly spent. Finally, much of health care regulation is best understood as special interest protection. Restrictive "scope-of-practice" laws, enacted by legislatures at the behest of special interest trade groups, protect the professional privilege of doctors and specialists while restricting public access to less expensive providers, like nurse practitioners and midwives.

Our problems are exacerbated because, as the Bipartisan Policy Center's Julie Barnes pointed out in a March 2012 "America the Fixable" essay, we pay for most health care on a fee-for-service basis. This creates incentives for physicians to provide as many discrete services as possible to maximize payment (a tendency often justified by an asserted fear of malpractice litigation). Moreover, hospitals, laboratories, imaging facilities, and drug companies are often eager to reward physicians for ordering their products and services. Attempts by the fee-for-service Medicare program to control the amount or payments physicians receive to a "sustainable growth rate" were stymied as utilization of services grew rapidly and intensive lobbying defeated attempts to reduce prices accordingly.

To combat these incentives, the federal and state governments have adopted a host of very complicated and often redundant statutes prohibiting kickbacks, self-referrals, and fraudulent and abusive claims practices, while private insurers impose pre-service approval and post-service utilization review for some procedures.

Not surprisingly, we have a dysfunctional health care system. We spend far more per capita and as a percentage of our GDP than any other country in the world. Despite this, 50 million Americans lack any certain means of paying for their health care, resulting in thousands of premature deaths and bankruptcies every year. Finally, the quality of American health care is not exceptional--we do very well with some things, like detecting and treating some kinds of cancer, but lag behind other countries in other respects and have a poor record for patient safety and medical errors.

What should be done? A purely private system of health care financing would solve some problems, but cause others. It would make all but the most basic health care inaccessible to many, perhaps most, Americans--a result most Americans would find unacceptable. Alternatively, we could move more toward a publicly financed system, the approach taken by all other developed nations. This solution brings its own well-documented problems, which vary from country to country--but it does allow much greater control over cost and facilitates broader access. The public solution runs contrary to the political culture of the United States, however, and is adamantly opposed by powerful interest and ideological advocacy groups. For the present, our mixed system must muddle along.

We can take steps, however, to reduce the regulatory burden. Most importantly, we can move away from fee-for-service payment. The ACA creates a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to experiment with alternatives such as bundled payments, and some projects are already underway. The ACA's Accountable Care Organization initiative encourages the sharing of savings among health care institutions and professionals, and represents the first time that multiple federal agencies, including the IRS, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, HHS Office of Inspector General, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have worked together to create a pathway through the regulatory thicket.

Private insurers are also encouraging better integration and coordination of care. The Kaiser-Permanente system has for decades efficiently provided high-quality care, integrating health care financing and delivery. Integration of delivery and financing eliminates an entire system of regulation, while integration of professionals and institutions, with payment for both on a basis other than fee-for-service eliminates the need for another layer of regulation.

We cannot wholly eliminate the need for health care regulation. Feasible changes in the way we deliver and finance health care could substantially reduce the regulatory burden. In particular, we need to reduce friction at the public-private interface, which can be accomplished in part by moving away from fee-for-service payment. Although the ACA imposes additional regulations on our financing system, it also contains within it initiatives that could in the end significantly reduce regulation. We need to keep making progress along these paths.

Ever since Norman Borlaug revolutionized the world's food supply by designing a hardier strain of wheat, scientists have been fascinated with the idea of engineering their way to foods that are even healthier than their natural cousins. We now have access to herbicide-resistant corn, tomatoes that are ever-ripe, calcium-fortified orange juice -- even rice that's high in vitamin A.

The latest product to get this treatment? Bananas. That's right: the humble fruit that comes mostly from overseas is about to get a serious makeover, if Australian researcher James Dale is successful:

India and Uganda are the top two banana producers in the world. Ugandans eat more than two pounds of bananas daily, and in India, especially in the south, bananas are a crucial component of a mostly vegetarian diet. But those [countries'] banana varieties, which are starchier than what we pick up at the grocery store, are woefully low in nutrients. By packing more nutrients into a package so many already depend on, Dale feels we could put a significant dent in a major health problem.

Using genes from a type of inedible banana that's incredibly rich in vitamin A, Dale says he's managed to increase the average banana's vitamin A content by a factor of four -- enough to provide half of a person's recommended daily intake. But he's not stopping there. Since iron deficiencies are also a major problem in developing nations, Dale is trying to figure out how to make banana trees suck up more of the metal from the ground and move it into the parts of the plant we eat.

I'll withhold the predictably bad jokes about "low-hanging fruit." But Dale's research is one more step in the quest for efficient gains in global public health, if it can avoid the backlash that golden rice and other biotech-reliant crops have encountered.

PROBLEM: Previous studies have suggested that musical training helps children's development. It remains unknown, however, how early and to what extent this experience can have a positive effect.

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METHODOLOGY: McMaster University psychologists led by Laurel Trainor assigned groups of parents and babies, who had shown similar communication and social development, in one of two types of weekly music instruction for six months. One music class involved interactive music-making as well as learning a small set of lullabies, percussion instruments, nursery rhymes, and songs with actions. In the other class, babies and their parents simply played at various toy stations while recordings from the popular Baby Einstein series were in the background.

RESULTS: Compared to the babies in the passive-music condition, the infants who took interactive lessons with their parents exhibited earlier sensitivity to the pitch structure in music by preferring to listen to a version of a piano piece that stayed in key over a less polished version. They showed better early communication skills, smiled more, were easier to soothe, and showed less distress when things were unfamiliar or didn't go their way. Their brains responded to music differently as well, showing larger and earlier brain responses to musical tones.

CONCLUSION: Music lessons for babies as young as six months of age improves their understanding of tonality and accelerates their social and communication development. Trainor says in a statement: "The infant brain might be particularly plastic with regard to musical exposure."

SOURCE: The full study, "Active Music Classes in Infancy Enhance Musical, Communicative and Social Development," is published in the journal Developmental Science.

In response to my post on tuna scrape, Professor Alan Reilly, Chief Executive, Food Safety Authority of Ireland (the equivalent of our FDA) sent this photograph of an actual tuna scrape label.

After I forwarded it to Bill Marler, he noticed that it is one of several photographs posted on the FDA's tuna scrape recall web page).

The type is too small to read so I've done some cropping:

Professor Reilly asks:

What is puzzling me is why this product "minced tuna" was used in sushi products. The label (copy attached) clearly states that the product must be cooked before consumption and it is for industrial uses only (labelled not for retail).

Those are good questions, but here's another, equally alarming. What's that strangely formatted Nutrition Facts label? It does not precisely follow FDA design or content requirements.

This is a red flag. If the company is not following labeling rules, it might not be following other rules either--safety, for example.

Safety? Uh oh.

Bill Marler reports that the FDA "483 Inspection Report" on the Indian tuna processing facility is now available. Read these quotes and shudder:

• Tanks used for storage of process waters have apparent visible debris, filth and microbiological contamination.
• There is no laboratory analysis for water used in ice manufacturing at the [redacted] facility to show the water used to make ice is potable.
• Apparent bird feces were observed on the ice manufacturing equipment at Moon Fishery; insects and filth were observed in and on the equipment.
• Tuna processed at your facility, which is consumed raw or cooked, comes in direct contact with water and ice.

I draw several lessons from this episode:

• Food is safer when cooked.
• Labels need to be read--and followed--carefully.
• Raw sushi is a high risk product, especially if it doesn't cost much.
• The FDA needs to be doing a lot more inspecting of overseas facilities, and before they cause problems.

All of this means that we need a better food safety system, one that can address the enormous proportion of our food supply that comes to us from countries with weaker food safety standards.

This post originally appeared on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.

Every day there are new studies linking our mental health to our physical health. Our moods or mental states - positive, neutral, negative - seem to be related to the risk of disease, and indeed, our likelihood of death.

Just last month, for example, a study reported that cardiovascular health is significantly better in people who report being happier. On one level, there is an obvious explanation to the phenomenon: Happy people are more likely to engage in the healthy behaviors - exercise and eating right - that lead to good hearts in the first place. While this relationship may have a lot of explanatory power, the plot seems to be thicker than this.

Are "happy" people set up differently to begin with? For example, their physiologies seem to be different from those of less happy people, with lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, reduced inflammatory biomarkers, and even changes in the wiring of the brain. All of these differences might make happy people better able to deal with the adverse events that life throws at them, and less likely to feel the effects of stress, which takes a toll on everybody's health. The happiness-health relationship is at the very least a two-way street.

Psychologists have debated for a while about whether happiness and unhappiness are two sides of the same coin, or whether they're unique entities.

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What Makes Us Happy?

But what is happiness in the first place? Is it about seeking out activities that make us feel good - indulging a fancy car or going out for a satisfying dinner - or does it have to do with a deeper sense of personal satisfaction over the course of a lifetime?

It's this question that may be at the heart of the matter. The kind of happiness you experience - and seek - may matter most to your health. In fact, it may be what defines it. There's a lot we still have to learn about how our heads contribute to bodily health, but here's what we know about the relationship so far.

DEFINING HAPPINESS ISN'T SO EASY

As most people have probably experienced, there are different types of "happy." There's the happiness we get from buying a new iPad and there's the happiness we get from having a fulfilling job that lets us buy the iPad. This fundamental difference is one that researchers have tried to tease apart, and they've described two distinct forms of happiness.

"Hedonic" happiness has to do with pleasure and being satisfied in an immediate sense ("hedonism," of course, comes from the same root). It's about how often you feel good, and experience feelings like excitement, interest, and enthusiasm.

People who are higher in eudaimonic, or long-term, happiness have reduced biomarkers of inflammation, like interleukin-6.

"Eudaimonic" well being, on the other hand, has to do with being satisfied with life in a larger sense; it's about "fulfilling one's potential and having purpose in life," explains Julia Boehm, who studies the relationship between happiness and health at Harvard. How autonomous or self-sustaining you feel, how interested you are in personal growth, the nature of your relationships with other people, whether you have a deep purpose in life, and your degree of self-acceptance are some of the variables that researchers try to measure to get a good idea of whether a person has eudaimonic happiness.

Some scientists have studied the two forms of happiness in the lab and found some significant differences. Work at the University of Wisconsin has found that people who are higher in eudaimonic happiness have reduced biomarkers of inflammation, like interleukin-6. These biomarkers, according to researcher Carol Ryff, are linked to a number of health problems like metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, so lower levels of them might offer a protective benefit. Ryff has also found that having a strong social support network - an integral part of long term life satisfaction - is connected with lower levels of the same biomarkers.

Eudaimonic happiness (or we could call it personal or inner satisfaction) may even help set up the brain differently. Hedonic or short-term happiness has more to do with the kind of "feel good" behaviors that light up the "reward circuits" of the brain, which rely on the neurotransmitter dopamine. These areas are also important in addictive behaviors, which makes sense, since satisfying an addictive craving is the ultimate form of short term (hedonic) pleasure.

On the other hand, when people who are happy in a deeper way (have more long-term, eudaimonic happiness), are faced with negative stimuli, they have more activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which governs executive planning and higher-level thinking. They also have reduced activity in "lower" brain regions, like the amygdala, the seat of our stress and fear responses. People with eudaimonic happiness are also slower to evaluate negative events as being such, which could mean that they are also less likely to "freak out" over real upsets in life.

Do Definitions Matter? Yes.

Some researchers aren't so sure that the two concepts need to be separated - and that one good definition of happiness could be sufficient. Boehm says that she prefers the term "positive psychological well-being" over eudaimonic happiness, because, as she says, "It captures a broad range of terms including happiness, purpose in life, optimism, life satisfaction, etc... It can be characterized by the positive feelings, thoughts, and expectations that a person has for his or her life. Essentially, positive psychological well-being is an indicator of psychological functioning that goes beyond the mere absence of disease, e.g., depression, anxiety." (More on this shortly.)

Whether eudaimonic and hedonic are the best labels for happiness is perhaps not so important. But what is clear is that the "feel good" sensations that we tend to think of as happiness may be quite different from what researchers consider happiness - the kind of long-term satisfaction that is shown to be reflected in our mental and physical well-being. If you revise your concept of happiness to include more emphasis on its long-term aspects, you could be on your way to a happier life just from that.

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BEING HAPPY IS MORE THAN NOT BEING DEPRESSED

Making the discussion even more interesting (but stickier) is the fact that happiness is more than just not being depressed. As Boehm says, "just because you don't have symptoms of depression or anxiety, that doesn't mean you are functioning optimally." Psychologists have debated for a while about whether happiness and unhappiness are two sides of the same coin, or whether they're unique entities. Psychological "ill-being" (depression, anxiety, and anger) has been linked to everything from higher stress hormone cortisol to increased heart risk to increased belly fat to lower "good" HDL cholesterol.

It's not enough to not be depressed - being happy is what actually gives the physiological benefits that we all want to gain.

But psychological well-being has been linked to different aspects of health, as mentioned earlier, like inflammatory biomarkers and cardiovascular health, though it's been studied less. One study directly compared the biological changes associated with well-being and ill-being, and found enough differences to suggest that well-being and ill-being are not likely two sides of the same coin, but that they are fundamentally different entities. This may explain why it's not enough to not be depressed - being happy is what actually gives the physiological benefits that we all want to gain.

WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY?

If you're not the happiest person in the world, don't panic. There are ways to increase your satisfaction in life and develop a stronger sense of the kind of well-being that could serve you well mentally and physically, now and in the future. Spending some time thinking about the kinds of things that give you pleasure might be the first step.

A couple of years ago, a team of researchers reported that the types of "American Dream"-type goals we often think of as being the ultimate happiness-inducers aren't so happiness-inducing at all.

By getting in touch with your values and finding ways to give back, you might, unwittingly, be serving yourself. Doing things that just make you feel good won't cut it.

People whose goals involved personal growth and the community were much happier than people who sought money or fame. This sounds a lot like the hedonic/ eudaimonic divide. "By attaining the 'American Dream goals,' [big house, fancy car, designer clothes]" said the study's author Edward Deci, "you are actually feeling less satisfied in the need for autonomy and feeling effective in the world [because you are dependent on external measures outside your direct control], and that leads to more ill−being."

So it seems like going after the material goods that are so appealing - a nice house, car, or bottle of wine - may actually make us more psychologically impoverished than the "larger" goals, like personal growth and self-satisfaction.

This study underlines the divide between what we may think makes us happy and what actually makes us happy - and, by extension, healthy. By getting in touch with your values and finding ways to give back, you might, unwittingly, be serving yourself. Doing things that just make you feel good won't cut it. "If you are living a full life," says Deci, "you will experience a lot of positive affect [emotions]. If you want to know something about living a meaningful life, just looking at subjective well-being is not enough." In other words, finding activities that have intrinsic value, and being a part of them - by doing work you believe in, volunteering, or helping out your community in other ways - is probably much more beneficial.

CHOOSING THE SUNNIER PATH

In the end, the relationship between happiness and health is not simple, and there's a lot we don't know. It's beyond the scope of this article, but we're also learning that happiness, or more specifically, having a sense of purpose in life, is linked not only to physical health, but also to brain health.

For example, Alzheimer's patients who have a sense of purpose in life have fewer symptoms (cognitive deficits) than people who have less purpose. On the flip side, people who are depressed in their middle or old age are at higher risk of developing certain forms of dementia, including Alzheimer's. These relationships also complicate our understanding of happiness and health, and are worth keeping in the back of our minds.

The bottom line is that we know that there are strong relationships between health and happiness, life satisfaction, and purpose, but how it works is still being mapped out. Mental well-being, ill-being, social support, lifestyle choices, and physical health all make up a vast matrix of variables that influence and play off one another.

While researchers are still working on pulling apart these relationships, taking some time to get in touch with your purpose will likely benefit your health, not to mention make your day-to-day life more pleasant in the process. The coming years are likely to bring a much deeper understanding of what happiness actually is, psychologically and physiologically speaking, and this may itself result in a deeper understanding of what health actually is.

This article originally appeared on TheDoctorWillSeeYouNow.com, an Atlantic partner site.

For a long time, it was a mystery as to how horses galloped. Did all four hooves at some point leave the ground? Or was one hoof always planted? It wasn't until the 1880s when a British photographer named Eadweard Muybridge settled the debate with a series of photographs of a horse in midstride. Muybridge took a great interest in capturing the minute details of bodies in motion. The images made him famous.

Muybridge could be obsessive -- and eccentric, too. His erratic behavior was blamed on a head injury he'd sustained in a serious stagecoach accident that killed one passenger and wounded all the rest. Now, researchers believe that the crash, which gave Muybridge a permanent brain injury, may actually have been partially responsible for endowing him with his artistic brilliance.

Muybridge may have been what psychiatrists call an acquired savant, somebody with extraordinary talent but who wasn't born with it and who didn't learn the skills from someplace else later. In fact, Muybridge's savant abilities had evidently been buried deep in the recesses of his mind the whole time, and the stagecoach incident had simply unlocked them.

It sounds crazy. But Muybridge is actually one of a number of people who've miraculously developed artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities as a result of a brain injury. There's Orlando Serrell, who was struck in the head with a baseball as a 10-year-old and found he could remember the weather for each day following his accident. There's Derek Amato, who woke up after hitting his head at the bottom of a pool and became a master pianist at 40, despite lacking any sort of musical training. There's Alonzo Clemens, whose verbal and cognitive abilities stopped developing at the age of three due to a head injury but who can assemble incredibly detailed sculptures of animals in a matter of minutes.

Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert keeps a registry of known savants as part of his research on the subject. Savants are extremely rare to begin with, he said in a phone interview. Acquired savants are rarer still. Of the 330 savants from around the world on Treffert's list, 300 were born that way. Only 30 acquired their abilities.

It wasn't until recently that scientists began figuring out what actually causes savant syndrome. In 2003, Bruce Miller, a professor of neurology at the University of California-San Francisco, discovered that some patients with a degenerative brain disease gained incredible artistic abilities as their condition worsened. The disease is called frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and it primarily affects the front-left portions of the brain.

FTD's limited pattern of degeneration is a crucial detail; patients who suffer from Alzheimer's, for example -- a disease that affects the entire brain -- don't generally show savant-like abilities. Why might savant syndrome be linked to a very specific kind of brain damage? One theory has it that since FTD leaves the rest of the brain alone, the unaffected regions step in to compensate for the loss of tissue, leading to what Treffert calls "the three Rs": recruitment, rewiring, and release.

"What happens is that there is injury," said Treffert. "There is then recruitment of still-intact cortical tissue. There is rewiring [of brain signals] through that intact tissue, and then there is the release of dormant potential within that brain area." In other words, savants may be unlocking parts of the brain the rest of us simply don't have access to.

Or do we?

It strains belief, but completely ordinary people are in fact capable of gaining savant-like skills for short periods of time. Thanks to a piece of equipment called the Medtronic Mag Pro, one researcher has managed to temporarily replicate the kind of brain "damage" seen among FTD patients in healthy humans:

A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''

[...]

Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.

In fairness, a few drawings don't prove very much. But Allan Snyder -- whom, Treffert confirms, has worked with Bruce Miller, the FTD scholar, before -- is developing new, more objective ways of recording the changes the Medtronic causes in his subjects.

"He calls it the 'thinking cap,' " Treffert joked.

The prospect of willfully inducing creativity conjures images of an augmented future, one where people carry around portable brain machines and give themselves a zap when circumstances demand an extra burst of intelligence. Maybe some people will choose to be permanently buzzed, at the cost of some verbal ability.

It sounds like science fiction. But the reality may be even more outlandish. Now that scientists understand how savant syndrome occurs, new research is turning to the underlying origins of the special abilities themselves. Most of it remains a mystery -- a loose collection of questions more than anything resembling answers. For example, how is it that somebody like Derek Amato, who'd never demonstrated any musical talent before hitting his head at the bottom of a pool, could suddenly handle jazz and classical pieces of astounding complexity without training? How is it that someone can suffer a stroke and wake up later only to discover that their English is tinged with a foreign accent?

Treffert thinks this could be the result of something called genetic memory.

"Some savants are very disabled," said Treffert, "yet they know the rules of math, they know the rules of music, they know the rules of art. But they've never been taught that. Well, how can that get there? The only way it can get there is genetically."

If Treffert's hypothesis is true, it potentially upends a lot of what we know about genetics -- not disproving it, necessarily, but vastly expanding the boundaries of what we think our DNA to be capable of. Could genes be more than a way to pass on physical traits? Could they, in fact, also be used to transmit knowledge from one generation to another? If so, what kind?

Scientists aren't the only ones to be fascinated by this idea. In the blockbuster video game Assassin's Creed, players delve into the main character's genetic memory archives and re-experience events from his ancestors' lifetimes. The franchise takes gamers through vivid "memories" of medieval Jerusalem, Renaissance-era Italy, and Ottoman-ruled Constantinople. No doubt the revelations held within our own DNA are much less exotic, but that's not stopping epigeneticists from plowing ahead. A major breakthrough in genetic memory may be no more than a decade away, Treffert estimates.

As neuroscientists increasingly discover how little they really know about the brain, what we do know is beginning to resemble the half-formed inklings about the equine gait that so boggled people up until 135 years ago. Connecting the dots might take a stroke of genius. But savant-inspired research is leading the way. Eadweard Muybridge would be proud.

Caffeine addicts, rejoice: all the coffee you're downing over the course of a day could be lengthening your lifespan. For real.

According to research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who drank four or five cups of coffee a day tended to live longer than those who drank only a cup or less. The benefit was more pronounced for women, but men also stand to gain somewhat from pounding joe.

Coffee-drinking men cut their risk for death by 12 percent after four to five cups of java, according to the study, which was led by the National Institutes of Health's Neal Freedman. Women who drank the same amount had their the risk of death reduced by 16 percent.

Freedman and his team drew data from the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study, a 13-year assessment. They found that coffee drinkers progressively cut their risk of death the more they drank. The sweet spot appears to be between four and five cups of coffee a day -- any more than that, and the effect wears off somewhat.

There is a catch: people who drink coffee tend to die sooner than non-coffee drinkers. That's because coffee consumption is often linked with other unhealthy behaviors like smoking. So, to add the most years to your life, the next time you're down at the diner, double down on the coffee, but leave the cigarettes out of it.

Update: Although the study may offer coffee drinkers some peace of mind when it comes to their habit, it's important to remember that this is an observational study only, not a clinical trial. As Freedman told Bloomberg News, "we don't know for certain coffee is having a cause and effect," and that coffee has more than 1,000 compounds that ought to be tested.

Klein and Fine have traveled across the country to document sustainable agriculture and cuisine, but they say this spot was special:

Almost halfway through our journey, we found a place where it would be easy to never leave. The beauty of Montana is stunning, and the approach to ranching at J Bar L is inspiring. Situated on 30,000 acres in one of the most important wild life corridors in the country, this ranch tries to replicate the bison's role in this habitat. The result is an area packed with wildlife, fertile soil as well as a healthy and delicious meat. AND the folks who run this place touched our hearts and became our friends.

More episodes from the series can be found on the Atlantic Video channel here.

For more information about The Perennial Plate, visit http://www.theperennialplate.com/. 

Two severely paralyzed people operated robotic arms and prosthetics using thoughts captured by implants in their brains, a new study disclosed.

Read an exclusive excerpt from The Atavist about subject S3, Cathy Hutchinson.

A robotic hand manufactured by the German space agency (DLR).

Today scientists announced in the journal Nature the results of a landmark experiment in which paralyzed subjects were able to control a robotic arm using only their thoughts. The research, after decades of exploration, holds out promise for the future of restoring damaged bodies using robotic prostheses.

Led by researchers at Brown University, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Massachusetts General Hospital, the study--known as BrainGate--utilized a device called the BrainGate Neural Interface System, implanted directly into the motor cortex of the participants. Wired to a bank of computers, the system was then able to decode their brain's neural signals for movement and translate them into robotic movement. "This work is a critical step," John Donoghue, the neuroscientist who developed BrainGate, said in a statement announcing the research, "toward realizing the long-term goal of creating a neurotechnology that will restore movement, control, and independence to people with paralysis or limb loss."

The two subjects--a 58-year-old woman identified as subject S3 and a 65-year-old man designated as T2, both with tetraplegia--were first able to control a cursor on a screen by thinking about its movement. They then graduated to an advanced humanoid robotic arm made by the German space agency DLR and an advanced prosthetic made by New Hampshire-based DEKA Research. When the subjects concentrated on moving the robotic appendages, their brain supplied the signals for their intent, BrainGate captured those signals, and the robotic limbs responded in turn.

The paper reports that both participants were able to "perform three-dimensional reach and grasp movements," including touching targets and grabbing a bottle. Perhaps most extraordinarily, however, "one of the study participants, implanted with the sensor five years earlier, also used a robotic arm to drink coffee from a bottle."

In the paper, that subject is S3, the female participant. Her real name is Cathy Hutchinson, and this is her story.

* * *

The first thing Cathy Hutchinson became aware of upon waking from three weeks in the quiet of a coma, 16 years ago, was the rhythmic alternation of surge then draw: whoosh, hiss, whoosh, hiss. As the contours of a room began to resolve before her eyes, she discovered the source of the sounds--a ventilator machine beside her bed. Her eyes followed the curve of a plastic tube issuing from the noisy box until it disappeared under her chin, entering her body through the opening in her throat left by a tracheotomy. When she tried to raise her head, she discovered that she could not. No amount of effort allowed her to lift her hand or flex her feet.

Her last memories were of feeling sick, of passing out as her 18-year-old son, Brian, helped her up the stairs to her bedroom, of waking briefly on the rough carpet of the hallway, unable to move. She was 43, a healthy nonsmoker, single mother of two, post office employee.

On that spring day in 1996, it took doctors nearly 12 hours following Brian's emergency call to discover that Cathy had suffered a catastrophic brain-stem stroke. The brain stem is located at the base of the skull, a small region of primitive structures crucial to survival. It governs the critical functions of breathing, swallowing, blood-pressure regulation, and consciousness and conducts all messages between the brain and the spinal cord.

A brain-stem stroke is the sort of medical event that can result in death immediately or soon thereafter. But in Cathy, who was young and in otherwise good health, the stroke disconnected her brain from the descending motor tracts of her brain stem--the neural pathways carrying instructions to her muscles--leaving her "locked in," not only quadriplegic but also unable to speak. The ascending tracts, which carry sensory information from body to brain, remained intact, allowing her the experience of pain, itch, heat, and cold but not the possibility of addressing them. She had a sensate, lucid mind incapable of action.

What recovery her body was able to make had happened early on after the stroke. She could control her eyes, she could swallow and breathe on her own, and she could move her head slightly, which allowed her to operate the wheelchair with a button on the headrest behind her. She communicated through a system--developed by engineers at UMass Dartmouth's Center for Rehabilitation Engineering to track her eyes and convert her gaze into mouse clicks. In this way, she could slowly pick out letters on a keyboard, allowing her to use her gaze to email and do some basic Web browsing.

In 2005, a friend of Cathy's, a nurse, came across a call for participants for BrainGate, run out of Brown University. The researchers were seeking patients with quadriplegia for a pioneering experiment in which an electrode-studded implant would be embedded directly into the brain, in the hopes of identifying and decoding the neurological activity that governed physical movement. The short-term goal was to use signals from the brain to control computers and then assistive devices. The long-term goal was to bypass damaged sections of the spinal cord and restore movement.

The study's codirector, a conscientious young neuroscientist named Leigh Hochberg, was blunt with Cathy: Whatever the failures or successes of the study, she could not hope that the results would assist her in her lifetime. "There are no expected benefits this early on in the research," Hochberg told me. "What we're doing, and what Cathy knew when we were starting and what she enthusiastically joined, is an endeavor to test and develop a device we hope will help other people with paralysis in the future."

Cathy's device was implanted in 2005, and the researchers first target was for her to control a computer cursor. As Cathy concentrated on moving her hand, her efforts unspooled on screens in front of the researchers, who tried to use the information from her brain as a sort of virtual mind-controlled mouse. When the researchers turned control of the cursor over to Cathy's neurons, the cursor immediately began to move haltingly across the screen. Cathy couldn't believe her eyes. "I was numb with shock and disbelief," she wrote to me, "so I moved the cursor all over the screen."

Soon, she was navigating a rudimentary game the researchers called "neural Pong." But moving cursors on a screen involves interpretation of only two dimensions of intended movement in a digital environment. The next trials would require a great leap. The researchers wanted to give Cathy the ability to operate in physical space. They hoped to allow her to control a sophisticated robotic arm to stretch, grab, and move real objects in her surroundings--her first chance to do so in nearly 15 years.

The rest of Cathy's story can be found in The Electric Mind by Jessica Benko, out today from The Atavist. The full ebook single is available for sale through Kindle Singles, iBooks, The Atavist app, and other outlets via The Atavist website.

While Weight of the Nation is airing on HBO this week (I'll comment on it after it's fully aired), here's what happens when public health officials try to do something to make it easier for kids to eat more healthfully.

The Massachusetts public health department came up with a proposal to ban bake sales in public schools 30 minutes before, during and after classes.

The reaction? An uproar. The ban, according to critics, would

• Make it harder to raise money for class trips and athletic equipment
• Undermine the fundraising efforts of parent and student groups
• Not help prevent obesity
• Take away choice from school districts ("government gone awry")

Under this kind of pressure, "the governor spoke, emergency orders were issued, and the Legislature voted."

End of ban.

Massachusetts public health commissioner John Auerbach pointed out:

The school nutrition standards have always been about reducing childhood obesity in Massachusetts and protecting our kids from the serious long-term health impacts that obesity can cause...At the direction of Governor Patrick, the department will seek to remove these provisions.

We hope to return the focus to how we can work together to make our schools healthy environments in which our children can thrive.

Best of luck.

This reminds me of what happened in Texas, when Susan Combs, then state agriculture director, attempted to ban cupcakes from public schools.

As Dr. Cathy Isoldi described in her study of school celebrations earlier this year (on which I am a co-author),

Such bans have prompted intense opposition in many areas of the country. In Texas in 2005, a ban on food service during classroom celebrations elicited parent outrage and resulted in the addition of a Safe Cupcake Amendment to the state's nutrition policy. The amendment, known as Lauren's Law, ensures that parents and grandparents of schoolchildren celebrating a birthday can bring in whatever food items they choose for classroom celebrations.

Isoldi's work makes it clear that school celebrations alone can account for a whopping 20 to 35 percent of a child's daily calorie needs. This percentage does not account for additional treats sent home with children, given to them by teachers as rewards, or purchased in school at bake sales.

You don't see an occasional cupcake as a problem? Read Bettina Siegel's post on what goes on in her kids' school and how often schoolkids are exposed to junk foods during the school day.

Of course kids will eat treats rather than healthier foods if given half a chance. Isn't it an adult responsibility -- at home and at school -- to make sure that kids eat healthfully?

The environment of many schools is anything but conducive to good health practices. While outright bans may be seen as going too far, some kind of restriction on junk food in schools seems like a sensible adult decision, given the impact of obesity on children, families, and the health care system so well documented in Weight of the Nation.

State legislatures should be promoting such efforts, not overturning them.

This post originally appeared on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.

New mothers would be saving themselves a lot of grief if they paid less attention to books and more attention to their own instincts when raising their baby.

This is one of the points that emerge in historian Angela Davis' new book, Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000.

Dr. Davis, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, interviewed 160 British women of all ages and backgrounds about their experiences of motherhood, including how it has changed through the years. And one point that continually came up was how inadequate motherhood manuals had made new mothers feel.

The experts' answers have varied through the years, but one thing that hasn't is the tone of their advice. Whatever the answer, it's always been given as an order, with a threat of dire consequences if the order wasn't followed.

---

MORE FROM THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW

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• Parents Are Key to Kids' Health Habits

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Should you feed your baby at the same time each day or vary the routine? Should you immediately comfort a crying baby who won't go to sleep or allow them to cry it out for a bit first? Should your baby sleep in your bed, or is this so dangerous as to be nearly criminal?

Some mothers have very clear ideas on how to handle these issues. Others don't and often turn to motherhood manuals, parenting books written by baby 'experts,' for answers to these questions.

The experts' answers have varied through the years, but one thing that hasn't is the tone of their advice. Whatever the answer, it's always been given as an order, with a threat of dire consequences if the order wasn't followed. These commandments usually have demanded unattainably high standards for mothers and their babies, sometimes leaving the mothers feeling like failures when reality intruded and they weren't able to meet them.

It hasn't helped that the actual advice has changed almost as often as clothing fashions. The earliest manuals all preached that babies need strict routines. As the years passed, the trend was towards less strict and authoritarian approaches. Around the 1990s, the pendulum began to swing back the other way towards a more regimented approach again.

After more than 50 years the experts still can't agree on the basics of motherhood. Maybe that's because the real experts are the mothers themselves.

Dr. Davis often spoke to women from different generations of the same family. The oldest were able to reflect back upon their own upbringing, as well as their children's and grandchildren's. Many were still unsure which of the experts' child rearing approaches was best.

So what's a confused mother to do?

From her interviews, what stood out most to Dr. Davis was that all babies and all mothers are different. The approach that often worked best was not to follow the "experts'" advice to a tee but for mothers to adapt this advice to their own personal situation. For many, this meant navigating a middle ground, adopting some elements of a routine-based approach but ignoring others, allowing them to be much more flexible in meeting their babies' needs.

Dr. William Sears's attachment parenting manual, The Baby Book, turned 20 this year. Benjamin Spock's book, Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, has remained in print for over 65 years. Perhaps one reason it's been so enduring is its opening advice to new mothers: "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do."

Timeless advice for perplexed mothers.

Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000 is published by Manchester University Press.

This article originally appeared on TheDoctorWillSeeYouNow.com, an Atlantic partner site.

PROBLEM: Ever since Francis Galton noticed the preponderance of firstborns in the English scientific community (PDF), experts have weighed in on whether birth order affects intelligence. Theorists have argued that "laterborns" live in less cognitively stimulating environments filled with more kids and are left with fewer resources for the pursuit of knowledge. Since intelligence is fairly heritable, can this seeming birth-order effect be explained instead by the preference of smarter parents to simply have fewer children?

• Kids in Families That Eat at Home Are Healthier
• Why Attention Deficit Disorder Is Over-Diagnosed
• Depressed Kids Are More Likely to Be Bullied

---

METHODOLOGY: London School of Economics and Political Science researcher Satoshi Kanazawa analyzed data from a British study of more than 17,000 people, who took multiple intelligence tests at ages seven, 11, and 16. He controlled for several variables, including fertility, social class, and parental educational background.

RESULTS: Children from larger families, regardless of their birth orders, tend to be less intelligent than kids in smaller households. Birth order is not associated with intelligence once the number of siblings is statistically controlled.

CONCLUSION: The apparent birth-order effect on intelligence may actually be due to family size. Since children largely inherit their intellects and less intelligent parents tend to raise more kids, the offspring of larger families tend to be at a cognitive disadvantage.

IMPLICATION: So why do smarter parents have fewer children? "More intelligent people are more likely to do unnatural things or things for which they are not evolutionarily designed to do," says Kanazawa, "and having fewer children is one such unnatural thing."

SOURCE: The full study, "Intelligence, Birth Order and Family Size," is published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

In 2008, the Chinese government conducted one of the largest real-time environmental experiments ever undertaken: In order to get air quality up to par for the summer Olympics in Beijing--in of the world's most polluted metropolis--the government halved the number of cars allowed to drive the city's roads, shut down coal-burning factories in the area, and halted construction projects, among other efforts. And it worked. Air quality met the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) standards during the Olympics and subsequent Paralympic Games; both Athletes and Beijing residents could breathe a little easier - at least for a while.

U.S. Olympic distance runner Amy Yoder Begley, who had previously visited Beijing, declared air quality "better than expected" upon arriving for the 2008 games. The IOC was pleased too. "I think, objectively, we can say that the Chinese authorities have done everything that is feasible and humanly possible to solve the situation or to address the situation," Olympic Committee chief Jacques Rogge reported during a press conference. "What they have done is extraordinary."

After the games came to an end, however, many of the temporary pollution-reducing measures were relaxed, and pollution levels climbed once more.

Although the period of blue skies in Beijing may have been fleeting, researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) and colleagues have found that even such a small window of cleaner air may have proved useful for residents' cardiovascular health. That's according to a new study published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Heart disease in on the rise everywhere in the world - especially in the developing world," says Dr. Junfeng Zhang, Professor of Environmental and Global Health at USC, and senior author on the study. "So, we thought that this drastic a change in air quality in a relatively short period of time could provide a unique experimental condition to really detect biological changes relevant to cardiovascular health."

For the study, Zhang and colleagues recruited 125 healthy, young people, all of whom worked at a local Beijing hospital. They measured several markers of heart health in study participants before, during, and after the Olympic period - most notably the von Willebrand factor and soluble P-selectin (sCD62P), indicators of blood clotting and noted precursors to cardiovascular events such as stroke and heart attack. Zhnag's team also measured daily concentration of air pollutants.

"We hypothesized that biomarkers of cardiovascular health would change as air pollution levels change," says Zhang. "And that is, in fact, what we found." As pollution levels dropped, so did indicators of cardiovascular risk in study participants. As pollution levels rose back to pre-Olympic levels, indicators rose right alongside.

While the link between cardiovascular disease and air pollution has long been acknowledged by the American Medical Association, this study is the first to directly look at the underlying mechanisms by which air pollution affects the heart.

"[Other] epidemiological studies have linked air pollution, especially fine particulate matter - 'soot' -- with adverse cardiovascular outcomes, but these studies seldom shed any light on biological mechanisms underlying this association," said Dr. John M. Balmes, Professor of Pulmonary Medicine, University of California San Francisco, responding to the study in an email to the Atlantic. "This study took advantage of the decreased air pollution of the Olympics period in Beijing to investigate potential mechanisms of the adverse cardiovascular effects."

But beyond understanding the mechanisms by which air pollution may impact cardiovasular health, Zhang says there's another important take-away point in his study: air pollution doesn't discriminate by age.

"'I'm young, I'm super healthy, I shouldn't worry about those things, is how young people think," Zhang says. "But this study shows that even if you're young and healthy, your physiology can actually detect the impact of air pollution."

Most governments would not be able to institute the sorts of radical pollution-reducing measures undertaken by China in 2008, but Zhang says there is still hope that even short-term and incremental reprieves from polluted air can help our hearts.

"This study can only answer a few questions we have about the link between air pollution and cardiovascular health. But I think the important thing is that even with these sorts of short term changes - if your body gets only a brief break from the chronic burden of air pollution exposure - it can still do some good for your health overall," he says.

Fighting through traffic on the way to work is hardly anyone's idea of a good time. Yet millions of Americans put themselves through this torture on a daily basis, which has prompted something of a new cottage industry in research on the health effects of commuting. Among other discoveries, in the past few years, we've learned that traveling to work takes a disproportionate toll on women's mental health; breathing in car exhaust increases your risk for a heart attack for up to six hours after exposure; and the time we spend sitting in traffic may even be gradually eroding our social capital.

Now, add to that a new study that finds people with longer commutes have larger waistlines as well as higher blood pressure. According to a team of U.S. researchers examining 4,300 Texas commuters, traveling more than 15 miles to work each day means lower odds of meeting good physical fitness standards:

Of the almost 4,300 residents from Dallas and Austin involved in the study, researchers discovered that for every 10-mile increase in driving distance, the commuter's BMI (body mass index) rose .17 units. People with lengthy commutes are nine percent more likely to be obese, either because they didn't exercise as much, are eating fast food while driving, or they're not getting enough sleep because their long commute forces them to wake up early.

"It could just be a function of having less discretionary time to be physically active," the study's lead author, Christine Hoehner of Washington University in St. Louis, told ABC News. "Or it could be related to people burning fewer calories because they're sitting longer."

High-quality maternity and neonatal care is critical not just to individual families but to society as a whole: obstetrician-gynecologists (ob-gyns) help ensure that babies are born healthy and work o optimize mothers' health, as well as to advance quality health care for women of all ages. 

Ob-gyns are among the most frequently sued medical specialists. According to a 2009 survey, 90 percent of board-certified members of The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) have been sued. On average, ob-gyns can expect to be sued on 2.7 occasions in a professional lifetime. One third of ob-gyns sued have been sued four or more times. Forty-three percent reported suits for care provided during residency training.

Rather than reflecting rampant negligence and maltreatment of patients, these numbers reflect that even the best care cannot guarantee a perfect birth outcome. Ob-gyns get sued for less-than-perfect outcomes--instances in which no one may be at fault but family medical costs can quickly skyrocket.

Our current medical liability system fails to provide appropriate and timely compensation to persons injured, fails to deter real negligence, and impedes efforts to correct medical errors and improve patient safety. Under the current system, medical justice is unreliable for both patients and physicians, and patient care is harmed.

Access to ob-gyn care has been diminished. This means less prenatal care as doctors decrease high-risk obstetrics (30 percent), reduce deliveries (14 percent), and stop obstetrics altogether (8 percent)--avoidance behaviors reported by 63 percent of ACOG members who responded to a 2009 survey. Access to preventive care is also diminished as fewer gynecologic surgeons are available to treat women with pelvic pain, infertility, or cancer. 

In Southeastern Pennsylvania,19 hospital maternity units have closed since 1997 due to medical liability concerns and costs. In Philadelphia, only the city's six teaching hospitals continue to deliver babies. Statewide, there has been a net loss of 43 hospital ob units over the last several years. Yet safe hospital deliveries and increased availability of prenatal care are among the very factors that contributed to a greater than 90 percent reduction in national infant and maternal mortality during the twentieth century.

 Assurance behaviors, another element of defensive medicine, result in additional laboratory and imaging studies and consultations. Both increase health-care costs and may subject patients to the risks of false-positive test results. Liability costs, including defensive medicine, are by one estimate $56 billion, or 2.4 percent of the nation's annual health-care tab.

Reliable justice would help improve the physician-patient relationship and medical care overall. Two grievous birth outcomes in particular--neurologic impairment, including cerebral palsy, and shoulder dystocia--can have a devastating effect on a patient and her family, as well as on an ob-gyn's relationship with her patient, her own family, and her profession. Neither of these outcomes is likely related to the obstetrician's actions or inaction. But multi-million-dollar jury awards often follow.

Despite dramatic improvements in maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality, the rate of cerebral palsy remains unchanged. Epidemiologic studies show that less than 10 percent of cases can be attributed to events occurring during labor and delivery. Yet the costs of caring for and educating these children are substantial, and malpractice lawsuits are often the only source of financing, regardless of an absence of fault. 

Shoulder dystocia constitutes an obstetric emergency. A newborn can suffer permanent injury to the brachial plexus--nerves supplying the infant's arm--when the baby's head delivers but the shoulders remain trapped in the mother's pelvis. More critically, the umbilical cord is compressed and the baby is deprived of oxygen. The obstetrician has only minutes to deliver the baby before it suffers brain damage or dies. Before intervention, the brachial plexus is already stretched; appropriate maneuvers to free the baby necessarily further stretch it. About 88 percent of brachial plexus injuries result in only transient impairment of the baby's arm, but unavoidable permanent injury afflicts the remainder.

Today, "experts" often testify that nerve injury itself proves obstetrical negligence, and omit that the obstetrician saved the baby's life. Some courts have denied obstetricians their right to explain brachial plexus injuries. Since this condition cannot be reliably predicted, the injury has occurred naturally, and the baby will die if not delivered within minutes. Should the obstetrician be held responsible for an outcome beyond her control? Is a lawsuit appropriate when the obstetrician saved the baby from a life-threatening circumstance?

When a doctor recognizes that there is no relationship between the quality of her care and the courtroom outcome, justice no longer exists, and a skilled and caring physician may be lost from the profession. It is not unusual for physicians to think about a change in specialty, practice location, or even career after an adverse event. Some physicians are so affected as to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.  

Most adverse health outcomes are systems errors, not acts of negligence by otherwise skilled care providers. Root cause analysis allows us to discover how established safeguards failed, and make important corrections. The National Transportation Safety Board similarly investigates airplane crashes and near-misses to make commercial aviation safer. The willingness of participants to disclose actions and thought processes is essential to root cause analysis. The fear of litigation, however, makes health professionals think twice. Efforts to improve patient safety and quality are hindered.

A system in which each case turns on unique facts and circumstances, in which cases involving the same facts have opposite outcomes, and in which outcomes provide no general lessons, methods or rules to improve patient safety is unreliable by definition. Patients need assurance that avoidable medical injuries will be recognized and compensated and that safeguards will be implemented to protect other patients. Physicians, especially ob-gyns, need assurance that in the event of an adverse outcome, their professional actions will be objectively evaluated to yield broadly applicable conclusions and recommendations. If health care is a right, society needs to determine who will compensate patients for unavoidable adverse outcomes. That depends on a reliable system of medical justice. 

• The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
• The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States. 
• There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.

Critics of the Obama Administration's drug policy, myself included, have focused on the president's broken promise about federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in jurisdictions where they're legal. But an even less defensible aspect of Obama's drug policy is how marijuana is scheduled.

As John Walker points out, the Controlled Substances Act gives the executive branch the power to unilaterally change a drug's classification:

Obama can instruct the relevant agencies under him to take an honest look at the research and reschedule marijuana so it qualifies as having legitimate medical uses. The Obama administration could easily and justifiably move marijuana to, say, schedule III, which happens to be the same schedule that synthetic THC is in, making medical marijuana legal under federal law.

There would be nothing unusual, extraordinary or legally suspect about Obama doing this. The executive branch has often moved certain drugs to lower or higher schedules based on new data without Congressional involvement. In fact, multiple sitting governors have petitioned the Obama administration asking him to move marijuana to a lower schedule, so he should be aware of the flexible authority he has. Obama is not some hapless victim whose actions on this issue are constrained by congressional law. The truth is pretty much the exact opposite. Under current law Obama effectively has the power to unilaterally make medical marijuana legal.

His failure to do so is frustrating and to his discredit because it's what the language of a law duly passed by a bygone Congress and signed by a past president demands. There just are accepted medical uses of marijuana today. Pretending otherwise is every bit as much an affront to science and empiricism as the most ill-informed denial of evolution or climate change. 

Yet here is how the Obama White House touts its drug policy:

Congress also bears substantial responsibility for the anti-scientific, anti-empirical aspects of American drug policy. If Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are able to define the terms of the upcoming presidential election, this issue won't come up. But voters have consistently shown interest in the subject when permitted to directly question politicians, and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee, is eager to challenge Obama and Romney on this issue given the chance. When opportunities for these challenges arise, the classification of marijuana is one of the most vulnerable parts of the status quo to attack.12 states have pending medical marijuana legislation.

Improving the health of adolescents worldwide is the surest route to better health globally, a new study has found. Unfortunately, according to a series in The Lancet, the health status of this age group has not improved as much over the past 50 years as that of children under 10 years of age.

Everyone tends to assume that adolescence is a healthy time of life; and it is, in ways. But it's also a risky time of life, especially worldwide.

Adolescents are more predisposed than adults to what are dubbed 'hot cognitions,' meaning they are more affected than adults by exciting or stressful situations when making decisions.

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Because of longer periods of time spent in school, delayed marriage, and a new understanding of how long it takes for the brain to fully mature, the period of adolescence has come to be viewed as extending from age 10 to 24 years of age, not from 13 to 18 or 19 as most assume.

This expansion of the boundaries of adolescence means that there are 1.8 billion adolescents in the world. If you find that a scary thought, consider the risks that are present in the lives of most adolescents:

As a group, teens are more frequently exposed to, or participate in, risky behaviors such as alcohol consumption and illegal drug use, and have sex with more casual partners than previous generations. They also face new challenges, such as social media.

In addition, adolescents are more predisposed than adults to what are dubbed "hot cognitions," meaning they are more affected than adults by exciting or stressful situations when making decisions. These hot cognitions may be associated with increased activity in the nucleus accumbens, a reward and pleasure center in the brain.

Researchers Susan Sawyer and George Patton and their colleagues from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and the University of Melbourne conclude that the lack of focus on adolescent health is a "missing link" if one looks at health concerns and the effect of health behaviors over the course of a person's life.

Adolescent mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries are generally four times higher when compared to those in high-income countries, according to the authors. Injuries account for roughly 40 percent of deaths in 10- to 24-year-olds, compared with 10 percent of the general population. The researchers believe reducing injuries should be a major target for adolescent health advocacy.

If accidents are the largest cause of death, mental disorders represent the biggest burden of disease for adolescents. The incidence of mental disorders rises sharply throughout adolescence according to the study.

Marketing and Social Media Risks

Adolescents represent a sought-after market, particularly for unhealthy consumer goods, such as tobacco products and foods high in sugar, fat, and salt. Although women are four times less likely than men to smoke, this four-to-one ratio drops to roughly two-to-one in teenagers globally. The reason? Girls are aggressively targeted by the tobacco industry worldwide.

The widespread use of social media is one development that Sawyer and Patton feel has both pros and cons. Although social media allows young people to access information and enables them to communicate and effect community change, it also exposes them to new risks such as cyber-bullying and sexting, the act of sending sexually explicit photos or text messages via cell phone.

Even sexual and reproductive health, which has been a focus of adolescent health programs, has remained an area of risk. There are more than 1 million new HIV infections identified every year in the 15- to 24-year old age group, and these cases account for 41 percent of all new infections in those aged 15 years and older. The authors suggest that even in this traditional area of adolescent health, there has been insufficient attention to health policy.

The authors conclude that, "In view of their dynamic and challenging health profile, the contribution of adolescent health to the global burden of disease, and the important effect of adolescents and their health across the life course, adolescents should be more prominent within future global public health policies and programming."

The study appears in the online edition of The Lancet.

This article originally appeared on TheDoctorWillSeeYouNow.com, an Atlantic partner site.

I was a member of the FDA Food Advisory Committee when the agency approved production of genetically modified foods in the early 1990s.

At the time, critics repeatedly warned that widespread planting of GM crops modified to resist Monsanto's weed-killer, Roundup, were highly likely to select for "superweeds" that could withstand treatment with Roundup.

I wrote about this problem in Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety. I added this update to the 2010 edition:

Late in 2004, weeds resistant to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup began appearing in GM plantings in Georgia and soon spread to other Southern states. By 2009, more than one hundred thousand acres in Georgia were infested with Roundup-resistant pigweed. Planters were advised to apply multiple herbicides, thereby defeating the point of Roundup: to reduce chemical applications.

Today, the idea that planting of GM crops is "widespread" is an understatement.

So, according to Reuters, is Roundup resistance.

Weed resistance has spread to more than 12 million U.S. acres and primarily afflicts key agricultural areas in the U.S. Southeast and the corn and soybean growing areas of the Midwest.

Many of the worst weeds, some of which grow more than six feet and can sharply reduce crop yields, have become resistant to the popular glyphosate-based weed-killer Roundup, as well as other common herbicides.

This is not a trivial problem. As the Ottawa Citizen explains,

The resilience of nature is evident across almost five million hectares of superweed-infested U.S. farmland. Some runaway weeds in the southern U.S. are said to be big enough to stop combines dead in their tracks.

How is the chemical industry responding to this threat? Zap it harder!

The industry is pressing the U.S. and Canadian governments to approve GM corn engineered to resist 2,4-D.

Remember 2,4-D? It was the principal ingredient in Agent Orange, the defoliant used during the Vietnam War. Although the health problems it caused have been attributed to contamination with dioxin, the uncontaminated chemical has also been associated with illness in some studies (the Wikipedia entry has references).

The chemical industry maintains that 2,4-D is safe at current usage levels. Maybe, but Ontario bans its use on lawns, gardens, and in school yards and parks. Weeds resistant to 2,4-D have been identified since the 1950s.

Is pouring more toxic herbicides on food crops a good idea? These chemicals cannot be healthy for farmworkers or for soil or groundwater.

Organic agriculture anyone?

Addition: Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center at Iowa State and organic farmer says in an e-mail:

The other issue that has weed scientists concerned is the fact that 2-4-D is known to be much more invasive than many other herbicides--it can drift in the air for long periods of time and land on many unintended crops.

2-4-D has been identified as the main cause for destroying the grape industry in Iowa--in the 1940′s Iowa was the 4th largest grape producing state in the nation, and then was virtually reduced to zero.

Clearly if 2-4-D is going to be the "answer" to Roundup Ready resistance it will now be used in much larger quantities than in the 1950′s and is not only likely to destroy the rebounding grape production (I think some 200 acres now) and the 8 wineries in Iowa, but will make it extremely difficult to grow vegetables, which will not be good news for the burgeoning CSA/farmers Market industry that has emerged in recent years.

This post originally appeared on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.

PROBLEM: Compared to their proportion of the North American population, East Asians are overrepresented in universities and in many professional settings. Still, why are they less likely to be promoted to leadership positions compared to Whites and other racial minorities?

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METHODOLOGY: University of Toronto researchers Jennifer L. Berdahl and Ji-A Min conducted four experiments to look into this so-called "bamboo ceiling." In one trial, they asked survey respondents to read the human-resource record of a business consultant whose last name was either Sutherland or Wong before indicating how much they would like to have the employee as a co-worker. The file also included different supervisor assessments on the employee's assertiveness, agreeableness, and leadership potential.

RESULTS: The dominant East Asian employee was more disliked than the non-dominant East Asian employee, the non-dominant White employee, and the dominant White employee. A separate trial showed that participants held descriptive stereotypes of East Asians as being competent, cold, and non-dominant, while another showed that the most valued expectation of East Asians was that they "stay in their place."

CONCLUSION: East Asians who don't conform to racial stereotypes are less likely to be popular in the workplace. "In general, people don't want dominant co-workers," says Berdahl, "but they really don't want to work with a dominant East-Asian co-worker."

IMPLICATION: Berdahl says managers and coworkers should be wary of this tendency against East Asian employees that exhibit leader-like behavior. She says, "The bias lies within observers and it's ultimately their responsibility."

SOURCE: The full study, "Prescriptive Stereotypes and Workplace Consequences for East Asians in North America," (PDF) is published in the journal Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology.