Fitness Master

Let's take a popular, locally made beverage, Zimmerman's Iced Tea, and perform a taste test outside a store that attracts a diverse clientele, such as the Walmart on 443 in Lehighton. We'll give adult volunteers a half-pint carton of Zimmy's and an unmarked half-pint carton of iced tea and ask them to decide which tastes better.

Only we'll pull a trick on them.

We'll have filled Zimmerman's Iced Tea in the unmarked cartons.

Out of 100 adult volunteers, how many do you think would recognize that there's no difference in the taste? Five? Ten?

One of the things I love about writing a health-and-fitness column is reading what could be called out-of-the-blue research. For instance, who would've thought that yawning was a sign of anything other than fatigue or boredom?

But many now believe that the primary function of yawning is to increase alertness and better absorb information by cooling the brain.

We prefer fast food. They prefer good food which leads to better health. How else can you interpret the numbers used by Peg Moline, in her Editor's Letter in the June issue of Natural Health?

"The U.S. uses 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) for health care and Americans spend just under 6 percent of their income on food," she writes. "In contrast, Europeans spend as much as 18 percent on food and just 8.6 percent on health care."

The original discovery in 2009 was so significant that the researchers all became Nobel Laureates. What they determined was the tiny pieces of DNA at the ends of chromosomes called telomeres had a job similar to aglets, the plastic or metal sheaths at the ends of a shoelace.

In the same way aglets keep laces from fraying as they are pushed through a shoe's eyelets, telomeres keep the active ends of chromosomes from being exposed.