Americans are fascinated by cooking---if someone else is doing it.  Since 2004, the prime-time audience for the Food Network has increased 55 percent to l.06 million viewers nightly, and names like Rachael Ray, Paula Dean, and Bobby Flay have become household words.

The alarm goes off.  We stagger out of bed, wolf down our breakfast bar, and head out the door to face another day.  True, we’ve only had five and a half hours of sleep instead of the eight hours we probably need, but a quick stop at Starbucks and a double shot of espresso will take care of the problem.  Right?

In the past, the label “gluten-free” meant little to most of us. If we noticed the phrase on products during visits to the grocery store, we didn’t think about it. For the one percent of Americans who have celiac disease, however, this has never been the case; for them, avoiding gluten was a life-saving measure, and finding foods that didn’t contain it was a constant struggle. 

Don’t let the gray hair fool you.  With a membership of 40 million plus, AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, is a force to be reckoned with.  

Can you see your feet (no cheating….you must be standing up)?  If not, you may be playing with fire, say You Docs, Michael Rozen and Mehmet Oz.  They list “belly fat” as fast becoming Public Enemy No. 1 

When he wasn’t occupied with small matters like discovering electricity or helping with the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin was busy “self-tracking,” which in the 1700s meant keeping a list of 13 virtues he considered important and putting a check beside one every time he violated it.  Accumulated data, he felt, provided him with a moral compass.

Just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, at the exclusive Cavallo Point Resort & Spa, a select group of very bright scholars, innovators, and Fortune 500 executives are sitting down to discuss the “future of the wellbeing movement.”  

Winston Churchill once said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”  In his new book Flourish, (Free Press: Simon & Shuster, 2011) Martin Seligman, esteemed psychologist and one of the founders of the Positive Psychology Movement, inspires us to become optimists and to get the most out of the lives we have been given.

MIT’s Technology Review Magazine named Jesse Schell one of the world’s top 100 young innovators. Early in his career he was the Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio where he worked on Disney theme parks and the massively popular kids game Toontown Online. Continue Reading

In an effort to combat the growing obesity problem, especially among children, Michelle Obama unveiled a new design on Thursday called MyPlate.  The new graphic replaces the government’s well known food pyramid which many critics found misleading and difficult to understand.

If you’re at all interested in running you’ve got to meet Dean Karnazes. Which is to say, read his new book Run!  26.2 Stories of Blisters and Bliss.  It is guaranteed to inspire you.

It is no secret that a healthy body promotes a healthy mind.   We also know that to maintain a healthy body we need to exercise.  Yet increasingly schools across the country, faced with shrinking budgets and high stakes testing demands, are choosing classroom time over physical activity for their students. 

We have long accepted the fact that sugar causes tooth decay and makes us fat.  But it’s a giant step for us to believe that it may in fact be killing us.  Nevertheless, that is exactly what Gary Taubes is suggesting in his article in the New York Times Magazine (4/17/2011)

Whether working at a desk or driving in their cars, Americans spend more than half their time sitting, according to a U.S. survey done in 2003-2004.  So it is not surprising that researchers are beginning to look at what effect being so sedentary has on the body.  The data is disturbing to say the least.

Bette Davis once remarked that old age is not for sissies, and that sentiment is echoed by millions of us when we struggle to get out of bed every morning.  Getting old is difficult—but research now shows that we don’t have to take it lying down.

The belief that we’ll get by with a little help from our friends did not originate with the Beatles.  We’ve always known that we need other people.