【推荐1】A study offers even more evidence of the harmful health effects of sugar. The research, published in the journal BMC Medicine, found that diets higher in free sugars –a category that includes sugar added to processed foods and sodas, as well as that found in fruit juice and syrups—raise one’s risk of heart disease and stroke.

The study relied on data about the eating habits of more than 110,000 people aged 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom, whose health outcomes were then tracked over about nine years. An author of the study, Cody Watling said sugars that occur naturally in whole fruits and vegetables are not considered “free sugars” and were excluded from the analysis. The researchers estimated participants’ carbohydrate(碳水化合物) intakes and then further broke that down by type of carbohydrate to focus on free sugars.

Then the authors compared that to the participants’ possibility of cardiovascular (心血管的) disease. The people who were found to have the highest risk of heart disease or stroke consumed about 95 grams of free sugar per day, which accounts for 18% of their daily energy intake, Watling said.

“Avoiding sugar-sweetened beverages is probably the single most important thing we can do,” said Walter Willett. He added that although there are some health benefits to drinking a small glass of orange juice occasionally, its sugar content means “a glass of fruit juice is the same thing as Coke.”

Cody Watling said the study demonstrates that the types of carbohydrates people choose to eat may matter more than the total amount. “What’s really important for overall general health and well-being is that we’re consuming carbohydrates that are rich in whole grains,” he said, while “minimizing the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.”

【推荐2】It’s hard to say why, but it’s just true: music is good for you. It can calm your spirit and help you vent (发泄) your anger.     1     But there’s one surprising yet well-documented effect that has really surprised us. Music lessons are very good for language comprehension -- and they might even be better than reading lessons.

    2     But in this new study from MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), researchers were able to see music lessons improve word comprehension right before their eyes. Led by Robert Desimone, the director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the team tested 74 children between the ages of four and five to see how their growing language skills were affected by piano lessons.

The 74 participants were divided into three groups.     3     The other two had their weekly academic lessons supplemented with three 45-minute lessons per week -- the first got piano lessons and the second took part in reading lessons.

The results? The ones who received a little extra learning every week outperformed those who just continued on with their normal studies.     4     Perhaps even more surprisingly, the children who took the music lessons even outperformed the ones who took the reading lessons when it came to telling the difference between two words that were very similar.

“That’s a big thing for kids in learning language: being able to hear the differences between words,” Desimone said in a statement. “They really benefited from that.” To the researchers, the results point to one clear conclusion:     5    

【推荐3】A large study from the Netherlands found that people who took a cold shower were less likely than those who took a warm shower to take time off work due to sickness.

A group of over 3, 000 people was divided into four groups and asked to have a warm shower every day. But one group was asked to end it with 30 seconds of cold water, another with 60 seconds of cold water, another with 90 seconds of cold water. After a three-month follow-up period, they found that the groups that had cold water had a 29 percent reduction of self-reported sick leave from work.

The reason why cold water might stop people from getting ill is not clear, but some research suggests it may have something to do with boosting the immune (免疫的) system. A study from Czechia showed that when athletic young men were asked to keep in cold water three times a week for six weeks, it gave a slight improvement to their immune system. However, more and larger studies are needed to confirm these findings.

Cold water has also been shown to improve circulation. When exposed to cold water, there is decreased blood flow to the skin. When the cold water stops, the body has to warm itself up, so there is an increase in blood flow to the surface of the skin.

There is also some evidence that a cold shower can help you lose weight. A study found that cold-water at 14℃ increased metabolism (新陈代谢) by 350 percent. Metabolism is the process by which your body transforms what you eat and drink into energy, so a higher metabolism roughly equals more energy burned.

A cold shower may also help relieve symptoms of depression. A mentioned mechanism is that, due to the high density (密度) of cold receptors in the skin, a cold shower sends a large amount of electrical waves from the nerve endings to the brain, which may have an anti-depressive effect.

【推荐3】Seaweed farming, which has a long history in Asia, is spreading around the globe. Over the past 30 years, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, world production of seaweed has boomed more than six times to over 35 million tonnes, with emerging markets in the Americas, Europe and Africa. The most recent numbers, from 2019, show that North America produces some 23,000 tonnes of wet seaweed per year.

Cascadia, which was founded in 2019, claims to be the largest cultivator in North America, with a harvest of 200 wet tonnes so far this year. Farms, small and large, are popping up fast. Many see this expansion as a good news story. The Global Seaweed Coalition (GSC)—a research and industry group—says humanity could, and should, be harvesting 15 times more seaweed by 2050. Coalition member Vincent Doumeizel is a senior adviser on oceans to a United Nations program working toward corporate sustainability. He talks about a “seaweed revolution” to feed the growing global population—a transformation as dramatic as the ancient shift to land-based agriculture. “In the ocean, we are still hunter-gatherers,” he says.

The Global Seaweed Coalition estimates that seaweed (high in protein and other nutrients) could add 10 percent to the world’s food supply using just 0.03 percent of the ocean surface. One recent study concluded that substituting 10 percent of human food with seaweed by 2050 could spare 110 million hectares of land for purposes other than agriculture. That’s about two percent of all farmland today.

Advocates like Doumeizel cast seaweed as the solution to many social and environmental problems: The industry requires no fresh water, pesticides or fertilizers; it doesn’t take up any land; it can overlap (重叠) with other uses of the ocean like offshore wind farms; it can help to decrease poverty in the developing world; and some companies, including Cascadia, are collaborating with local communities.

Seaweed creates a rich habitat for sea life, soaks up carbon dioxide, counter-acts acid and absorbs run-off nutrients, although evidence quantifying how farms, specifically, help with such things remains scarce.