【推荐1】Comfort food makes a person feel good. Food high in sugar or fat tends to improve mood by stimulating the brain’s reward system. So it makes sense that many of us may turn to food for comfort in times of stress. There’s some fascinating research that examines food as a source of comfort. However, the most interesting thing about this research may be that foods are far less comforting than we tend to believe they are.

Traci Mann, a professor of psychology, and colleagues conducted a series of study with college students. The researchers examined how much comfort foods actually improve mood. They provided students with one of the three foods that they had indicated were their top, personal comfort foods. After producing a negative mood by having them watch movie clips designed to increase their sadness, anger and anxiety, the researchers offered the students their comfort food.

They had to assess (评估) how they felt before and after they were supposedly comforted by ice cream, pizza or whatever they had indicated they typically ate to feel better. All of the students completed the study on two separate occasions: once when they were able to eat their comfort food and once when they were able to eat another food they liked, but they wouldn’t call a comfort food. The researchers found that comfort food did improve students’ moods — but only by a little bit and not more than the other food they liked.

In another study, comfort food was compared to no food at all, and students’ moods seemed to improve even when they didn’t eat anything—most likely just due to the passage of time.

The take-home message from the studies? While the comfort food may make the person feel better for the time being, it does little to address emotional problems. Of course, everyone can indulge(纵情)in a comfort food from time to time, but overall, aim for these instances to be the exception rather than the rule.

【推荐3】It would be nice if eating a particular food could magically protect you against all the boring illnesses. It’s not that simple, of course. Hand washing remains your best defense against picking up illnesses, and sleep is a strong defense too. But what you eat does play an important part. Though it isn’t because of just one or two foods, what you eat in your daily diet have an effect on how weak or strong your immunity(免疫力)is.

We’d better eat fruits and vegetables every day. They contain key vitamins needed in the immune system. For example, Vitamin C and Ain foods help immune system work well to keep us healthy. Remember that eating the actual fruit or veggie is better than eating single-vitamin supplements(补品).

Getting too little protein(蛋白质) can weaken your immune system. Protein-rich foods supply the amino acids(氨基酸)you need to build important proteins in the body. Animal foods like beef and pork also contain zinc(锌), which your body uses to make t-cells.

Fermented foods are foods that are naturally protected by bacteria(细菌), and they’re good for the micro biome(微生物).That’s the name for the bacteria that live in your stomach, where a lot of cells in immunity actually live. Fermented foods like yogurt help beneficial bacteria develop fast in the stomach, leaving less room for harmful bacteria.

【推荐2】What makes a person a giver or taker? The idea of “give vs. take” take shape in all interactions and relationships of our lives. We’re either giving advice, making time for people, or we’re on the receiving end. We keep changing between the two based on different situations on a daily basis, if not a hourly one.

According to Adam Grant, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, most people are matchers. They make careful observations on takers and make it a point for them to pay something back. They hate to see people who act so generously towards others not receive any rewards. Actually, most matchers will try hard to promote and support givers so that they can get the good they should get.

Is there a gender factor (性别因素) that plays a part in this?

A study led by Hannah Riley Bowles, a professor at Harvard University, focused on this question. She asked 200 senior managers to sit down in pairs where one person would act as the boss and the other as a worker to discuss salary promotions. Male “workers” asked for an average salary of $146k while the females asked for only $141k. But why did they not bargain as hard as the men? Simply because they were more likely to be givers.

As a woman, I do enjoy the act of giving up my time, my knowledge, and my care and attention to others. I don’t expect anything in return, but I do tend to pull myself away when I feel like I’m being taken for granted (理所当然). I also tend to get upset when I see a loved one’s continuous actions of kindness go unnoticed. So, it’s safe to say I’m 50% giver, 35% matcher and 15% taker.

I do know someone, however, who is 99% giver. They’re constantly giving their time, sharing valuable ideas and going our of their way for everyone who crosses their path. Although they’re changed the lives of many people , they rarely see any of it returned. But the universe is slowly repaying them; they’re now extremely successful, well known for what they do.

【推荐3】My college experience included this life-skill lesson: Drink alcohol on a full stomach. Or you will get inebriated too quickly. Of course, most college students shouldn’t be drinking at all, but we know from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism that close to 60 percent of college students aged 18 to 22 do consume alcohol, which makes harm-reducing approaches important.

Unfortunately, campus authorities and researchers are reporting a practice that turns the full-stomach drinking strategy on its head: rather than filling up before a night of partying, significant numbers of students refuse to eat all day before consuming alcohol.

This is a high-risk behavior called “drunkorexia,” which is one part eating disorder, one part alcoholism—a very dangerous combination for college-age students. The term drunkorexia, which can also include excessive exercise or purging before consuming alcohol, was coined about 10 years ago, and it started showing up in medical research around 2012. Drunkorexia addresses the need to be the life of the party while staying extremely thin, pointing to a flawed mind-set about body image and alcoholism among college students, mostly women.

Imagine this scenario: A female college freshman doesn’t eat anything all day, exercises on an empty stomach, then downs five shots of tequila in less than two hours. Because there’s no food in her system to help slow the absorption of alcohol, those shots affect her rapidly, leading to inebriation and possibly passing out, vomiting or suffering alcohol poisoning. That’s drunkorexia.

Tavis Glassman, professor of health education and public health at the University of Toledo in Ohio, researches drunkorexia and worries about scenarios such as the one described above: “With nothing in her system, alcohol hits quickly, and that brings up the same issues as with any high-risk drinking: getting home safely, sexual assault, unintentional injury, fights, hangovers that affect class attendance and grades, and possibly ending up in emergency because the alcohol hits so hard,” he says.

“Alcohol can negatively affect the liver or gastrointestinal system, it can interfere with sleep, lower the immune system and is linked to several types of cancers,” Hultin says.