Blog Archives
Scary New Cigarette Labels Not Based in Psychology
There’s no question that the nine new graphic cigarette warning labels designed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which will be on all cigarette packages sold in the United States starting in September 2012, are ghastly. But has rampant gruesome imagery in shows like House emasculated their effectiveness? And will these pictures really convince a jaded smoker to quit or prevent a rebellious teenager from starting?
The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention Tobacco Control Act, which gave FDA the authority to regulate tobacco, mandated that the agency issue requirements for cigarette labels large enough to make up 50% of the front and rear panels of the package, with specific wording of risk warnings, including “color graphics depicting the negative health consequences of smoking.”
Read the rest of this entry
Quite a Stretch
This is the absolute best article we’ve EVER read on stretching. First and foremost it continually maintains both context and perspective, acknowledging both the satellite view and the zoom lens, the subjective bias of the author and the objective science as it appears to currently stand…
by Paul Ingraham
Stretching just doesn’t have the effects that most runners hope it does. In particular, plentiful recent stretching research has shown that stretching doesn’t (1) warm you up, (2) prevent soreness or injury, or (3) enhance peformance. No other measurable and significant benefit to stretching has ever been proven. Even if it worked, stretching would be inefficient, “proper” technique is controversial at best, and many key muscles are actually biomechanically impossible to stretch — like most of the quadriceps group (which runners never believe without diagrams). If there’s any hope for stretching, it might be a therapeutic effect on muscle “knots” (myofascial trigger points), but even that theory is full of problems…
Read the rest of this entry
A Stretching Experiment
by Paul Ingraham
I am a skeptic, known for my criticisms of stretching. However, I do enjoy stretching, and even I believe that diligent stretching can increase flexibility, because that’s the one effect of stretching that research has backed up. So for thirty days this summer I optimistically stretched my hamstrings — an experiment in the “lab of me.” I was truly disciplined: four full minutes of intense stretching per leg, per day. I did every stretch in a piping hot steam room, which is usually considered an ideal circumstance for stretching, whether that is true or not. What happened? Read the rest of this entry
