Ditch the apples. Go for the avocados
We’ve all heard about “an apple a day,” but instead of apples you might want to go with avocados.
tookapic/Pixabay
Avocados are generally thought to be a healthy fat. A study just published in the Journal of the American Heart Association proves that they actually don’t do anything for your waistline but will work wonders on your cholesterol level. The study involved 923 participants who were considered overweight/obese split into two groups: One was asked to consume an avocado a day, and the other continued their usual diets and were asked to consume fewer than two avocados a month.
At the end of the 6 months, the researchers found total cholesterol decreased by an additional 2.9 mg/dL and LDL cholesterol by 2.5 mg/dL in those who ate one avocado every day, compared with the usual-diet group. And even though avocados have a lot of calories, there was no clinical evidence that it impacted weight gain or any cardiometabolic risk factors, according to a statement from Penn State University.
Avocados, then, can be considered a guilt-free food. The findings from this study suggest it can give a substantial boost to your overall quality of diet, in turn lessening your risk of developing type 2 diabetes and some cancers, Kristina Peterson, PhD, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at Texas Tech University, said in the statement.
So get creative with your avocado recipes. You can only eat so much guacamole.
Your nose knows a good friend for you
You’ve probably noticed how dogs sniff other dogs and people before becoming friends. It would be pretty comical if people did the same thing, right? Just walked up to strangers and started sniffing them like dogs?
Well, apparently humans do go by smell when it comes to making friends, and they prefer people who smell like them. Maybe you’ve noticed that your friends look like you, share your values, and think the same way as you. You’re probably right, seeing as previous research has pointed to this.
For the current study, done to show how smell affects human behavior, researchers recruited people who befriended each other quickly, before knowing much about each other. They assumed that the relationships between these same-sex, nonromantic “click friends” relied more on physiological traits, including smell. After collecting samples from the click friends, researchers used an eNose to scan chemical signatures. In another experiment, human volunteers sniffed samples to determine if any were similar. Both experiments showed that click friends had more similar smells than pairs of random people.
Weizmann Institute of Science
The eNose does its thing.
“This is not to say that we act like goats or shrews – humans likely rely on other, far more dominant cues in their social decision-making. Nevertheless, our study’s results do suggest that our nose plays a bigger role than previously thought in our choice of friends,” said senior author Noam Sobel, PhD, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
Lead author Inbal Ravreby, a graduate student at the institute, put it this way: “These results imply that, as the saying goes, there is chemistry in social chemistry.”