H.E.A.T. Blog

Just because it says "sugar-free" on the package doesn't mean it really is. Here's an interesting snippet from the NYT blog that explains how artificial sweetners are often paired with things called sugar alcohols, which provide fewer calories than regular sugar and are found in tons of everything from sugarless cookies to gum.  

While it might not matter much for most people, this can make things tricky for those of us who are trying to manage our blood sugar. You can identify sugar alcohols in food by looking for ingredients that end in "-ol," like sorbitol, maltitol and xylitol. {Read the rest}

And we're back! Apologies for the temporary hiatus, folks. Just in case you missed this one, here's a great NYT story about how there are turning out to be more differences between the way men and women respond to exercise science than researchers originally thought.

New studies are finding that women react differently to protein during recovery; they pack fewer carbohydrates into their muscles for fuel; and they sustain less muscle damage during hard intervals than their male counterparts. It's not completely clear what this means yet -- we still need more research that includes females. (Exercise studies have typically used only male "guinea pigs" and just assumed the same results applied to estrogen-enhanced athletes.) But the hope is that these findings (and the ones to follow) will eventually help us train better for our body types and improve our understanding of why we perform the way we do.

{Read the rest}

Photo Credit: Cynthia "TLC" Reilly

In hilarious sports news, here's a great NPR piece on one man's search for the "world's dumbest competition." Named Sports Writer of the Year eleven times, ESPN's Rick Reilly traveled around the world in search of sports that are "dumb to everybody except to those people who actually played them" for his new book, "Sports from Hell." What he found (and also actually participated in) were games including:

• The World sauna championship -- Are you willing to let your inner organs boil? Players in Finland stepped into a sauna set at 261 degrees. The person who stayed the longest won(12 minutes, in the case).
• The rock, paper, scissors championship -- In Las Vegas and Toronto, there are actually "professional rock, paper, scissorists" who use serious logic and instincts to predict what another person will throw. There's even a world RPS president.
• The Chess boxing championship -- This game (pictured above) consists of two guys boxing, then the ref brings in a waterproof chessboard. They both whip off one glove and play speed chess for 4 minutes, then go back to boxing, then go back to chess, and so on. (Picture blood all over the chessboard.)

• The defacto world target-vomiting championship -- These people drink food coloring, run a mile, paddle a surfboard a mile, chug a 6-pack of warm beer in 15 minutes and then projectile vomit on a specific target (like a bystander's elbow or chest. Says Reilly, it looked like a "fire hydrant out of Willy Wonka."

For more details on your new favorite "sport" -- or to find out the rules so you can suggest that we incorporate chess boxing into the next Saturday workout, read the rest!

How much coffee do you drink every day?

Nothing tastes better than your first cup in the morning (why do you think I always show up to camp, Starbuck in hand?!), but apparently the black stuff has been tricking us all these years. According to a new study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, even though 8 out of 10 adults admit to drinking coffee (and reveling in its life-giving effects), it turns out that caffeine doesn't really give us the jolt we crave. It basically just gets us back to zero after a night of caffeine withdrawal.

Though it's technically not an addiction, caffeine dependence can cause you to get a headache when you try to quit cold-turkey, as well as make you jittery when you drink too much. But despite all this, the health experts still say we can keep our java. (We were going to anyway). A little caffeine -- 3 or fewer cups a day -- can actually boost the power of painkillers and treat migraines. So pour yourself some more and read the rest!