Take care of your ears

Do you hear a buzzing sound often? Do you find it hard listening to faint sounds? If you are used to listening to loud music, it is likely that you may have these problems.

Loud music can damage your ears in the long run. “Even daily sounds can damage your hearing in a way that you will only realise much later,” says ENT specialist Dr Akash Bannerjee.

Overexposure to loud noise can make your eardrums thin, eventually breaking them and making you deaf. Dr Bannerjee says the highest sound you should expose your ears to is 125 decibels.

Busy traffic

During maddening traffic, honking increases, tempers rise and noise levels eventually go up. “The noise in traffic can go up to 115 decibels during rush hour. Overexposure to this amount of sound will slowly, but surely impair your ear,” says Dr Deepak Vora, an ENT specialist.

Prolonged mobile phone usage

Keeping your phone volume loud can expose your ear to 100 decibels of noise. Limit phone calls to two minutes. Use the silent mode as much as possible.

Watching movies in theatres

You may think that fancy sound systems in theatres make your movie-going experience better! In reality, most movie theatres create 120 decibels of noise. You may not feel so while watching the movie; but you will feel the effects later.

Music concerts

If you have ever been to a rock concert, you will know what we mean. The noise levels at rock concerts can reach 150 decibels. “Your hearing can be damaged for up to two weeks,” says Dr Bannerjee.

Pubs/discotheques

Noise levels in these places can shoot up to 130 decibels. It could take anywhere between 20-30 minutes to feel a difference in your hearing. The damage is slow, but loud music can also cause the death of hair follicles.

Using earphones

“They can cause maximum damage to your ears. When your ears are closed because of earphones, you are encouraging the growth of bacteria,” says Dr.Vora. This can damage your hearing; starting slowly from the internal parts of your ear.

It is important that you take care to protect your hearing every day. “Wear earmuffs, especially if you are exposed to road repairs,” says Dr Bannerjee. Alternatively, you could use cotton in your ears to rest them periodically. That sure ‘sounds’ good…

Exercise ‘forestalls osteoporosis’

Physical activity can help forestall osteoporosis, according to Medical College of Georgia researchers. 

Declining estrogen levels have long been linked to osteoporosis, but bone density starts to decline years before these levels drop, according to Dr. Joseph Cannon, Kellet Chair in Allied Health Sciences and principal investigator of the National Institute of Aging-funded study. It's during that time that levels of follicle-stimulating hormone, released by the pituitary gland to help regulate ovarian function, actually increase.

Cannon theorizes that higher levels of FSH decrease bone mineral density by increasing cytokines, regulatory proteins produced by white blood cells. One cytokine in particular, interleukin-1, signals certain cells to transform into osteoclasts, which break down and resorb bone.

"We hypothesize that the higher levels of FSH decrease bone mineral density by influencing the production of cytokines," said Cannon, who presents his team's research at the American Physiological Society's Experimental Biology 2010 conference in Anaheim, Calif. April 24-28.

After measuring FSH and bone mineral density in 36 women between the ages of 20 to 50, the researchers correlated higher FSH levels with lower bone mineral density.

When they incubated FSH with white blood cells isolated from the women, it stimulated production of interleukin-1. Moreover, higher circulating levels of IL-1 correlated with lower bone mineral density, if the levels of interleukin-1 inhibitory factors were taken into account.

Additionally, they found that study participants who exercised more than 180 minutes a week retained greater bone density.

"Our work provides more evidence that physical activity is important for maintaining bone density. It's a case of ’use it or lose it," Cannon said, citing his team’s findings that exercise seemed to promote inhibitory factors that help keep interleukin-1 and bone breakdown under control. 

Want to lose weight? Keep a journal

Motivation and keeping a journal of what you eat are key components for shedding excess weight, according to new research.Scientists at the University of Kentucky and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that the type of motivation for dieting and techniques to boost it when it dips could mean the difference between success and failure.

"Motivation has an impact on weight loss but the impact is really mediated by adherence to self-monitoring," said Kelly H. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky. "If you are going to self-monitor your diet and exercise every day you are going to lose more weight.Webber, who along with her colleagues reported the findings in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, said the best way to self-monitor is to keep a journal of everything you eat and how much you exercise.

The researchers studied two types of motivation, autonomous and controlled, during a 16-week weight-loss program involving 66 overweight women. Autonomous motivation is driven by personal reasons, while controlled motivation is based more on pressure from others and feelings of guilt.They found that dieters who were self motivated and who kept a journal tended to be more successful.

"People who actually write down everything they eat and drink during the weight loss program are going to do better. And that is probably why commercial programs like Weight Watchers are very successful," said Webber.All of the dieters were given questionnaires and asked to describe their motivation. Their weight loss and motivation were measured every four weeks during the program. They also measured their own progress with a online self-monitoring program.

"The importance of motivation is that it gets you to self motivate, which is the behavior that matters in weight loss," Webber explained.Sustaining motivation was also essential because once it began to drop, usually between weeks four to eight, successful dieters who dropped 5 percent of their body weight were those who managed to keep the motivation going.Webber suggested that if motivation starts to fall after about four weeks it would be a good time to boost it with initiatives. "We think that contact with a counsellor is always helpful with motivation and contact with other people trying to lose weight," she said. "Seek support. I think we need support to keep continually motivated. Some people are successful on their own but most of us need support."

Your Diet In 2020

Just checked out with the grocery cart of the future? Here's your digital receipt scoring the nutrient richness of your trip. Heading home for dinner? Your smart fridge has scanned all the food in your kitchen, compiled a menu of the healthiest meal combinations (tailored to your food preferences and allergies, of course) and has started preheating your oven.

In 2020, all the things we've always been told to do--eat better, exercise, get some sleep, see your doctor--will not only be easier, we'll do them in spite of our best efforts not to. Making healthy choices will be done for us.

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Take nutrition. Imagine if today's nutrition labels--with their user-friendliness of tax forms and the informational consistency of a Madoff prospectus--were replaced by a universal icon that ranked all food with a brilliantly simple combination of a color and a 1-to-5 rating based on a database of nutritional information. Making a healthy choice becomes as simple as picking a color and the highest number rating you can find.

Video: 2020 Medicine

For the last several months my colleagues and I tagged along with strangers on their grocery trips and even invited ourselves to their family dinners, all in the name of understanding how Americans decide what to eat. What we learned is that people unwittingly develop basic principles or philosophies about what to eat, based on a buffet of often conflicting sources: morning shows, celebrity nutritionists, cereal boxes, a best friend and (at best) five minutes of conversation with their doctor. The result is an incomplete and often inaccurate understanding of nutrition that leads to unhealthy food choices and, ultimately, poor health.

When it comes to food, our research found that all 300 million Americans typically fit into just four distinct types of eaters: Convenient, Comfortable, Confused and Convinced. A person's "Food Personality" is based on how heavily influenced they are by a particular situation, and whether they have a defined or undefined approach to nutrition.

To help Americans eat better, we must create a universal nutrition information system that is both intuitive and easily adopted. This is no small task. The USDA, FDA, Food Standards Agency, supermarket chains and food producers have made attempts at standardizing and simplifying consumer choice, yet none have improved America's eating habits. Why? We found that no approach takes into account the entire user experience. Package labeling--the predominant focus of most systems--is only one consumer touch point.

In 2020 we'll be able to leverage interconnected devices that go beyond a fire hose of nutritional information. We'll be able to collect and aggregate food choices and their nutritional impact over time, ultimately driving behavioral change through integrated experiences. Digital interconnectivity will link together every food decision--imagine having an instantly updated nutritional rating that is omnipresent in your life. Purchase a salad for lunch, watch your rating go up. Eat those buffalo wings, watch it plunge.

A universal icon will be the core to realizing a universal understanding of nutrition. By creating one intuitive system, we can help everyone effortlessly identify and track the nutrient richness of what they eat. With this vision in mind, we have proposed an icon combining a number score and color value that is easy enough for even a 5-year-old to grasp.

In our future vision, a simple choice of a 3-value loaf of multigrain bread over a 2-value roll sparks the urge to reach a 4-value shopping trip. The icon is definitive enough to score every food combination from a single vegetable to a month of meals. It's flexible enough to help every Food Personality regardless of the decision before them: salad vs. fries, pretzels from brand X vs. brand Y, or spaghetti dinner vs. mac-n-cheese. And, ultimately it encourages consumers--and food manufacturers--to make decisions on the basis of health first.

The alternative is a technology-fueled, convenience-charged world of overmarketed, indulge-now-take-a-vitamin-pill-later foodlike products, each less healthy than the next.

But if we start today with a universal system for making food choices, by 2020 we'll have a world where nutritional value defines the competitive food marketplace. The tastiest benefit? We'll change the world whether the average consumer realizes it or not.

Dan Kraemer is a principal at IA Collaborative, a creative enterprise specializing in branding, graphic and interface design, product development and strategic research. His work focuses on connecting observed human behaviors with design innovation.