A report to be released by the Japanese governement’s education reform panel was put on hold because some felt it contained to much meddling.  The report advised Japanese mothers to breast feeed and sing lullabies to their children.  It recommended that families turn off the telivision sets during meal time and that children avoid the internet and mobile phones because they help spread evil.  The report sounds like common sense to me, except the part about the phone and Internet being evil.

Seem to be the newest thing, women who helped deliver their own baby by caesarean.

Here are some of my favourite quotations on health by some famous folks:

The best activities for your health are pumping and humping.
Arnold Schwarzenegger

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.
Buddha

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Redd Foxx

That is one persausive commercial!

This guy should be the poster boy for why “Not to Abuse Steriods”.

This guy sure is lucky to be alive.  I hope they can re-construct his skull.

Defying the advice of parents and teachers, a new study shows that you’re better off sitting back than sitting up straight..

An Alberta researcher has found that while seated, with feet flat on the ground, leaning back to create a 135-degree angle between the thighs and trunk is much less straining on the spine and will not lead to the potentially chronic back pain associated with sitting in an upright position for extended periods of time.

“Up until now it’s always been, ‘Granny knows best,’ so you sit up straight while eating all your veggies,” said Waseem Amir Bashir, a researcher in radiology and diagnostic imaging at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton and lead author of the study.

Back pain is the most common cause of work-related disability.  “We weren’t made for sitting for such long periods of time.”

Using a new type of a magnetic resonance imaging scanner that allows patients to move freely within it, Dr. Bashir and his colleagues were able to monitor spinal disc movement in 22 healthy subjects for various postures. Traditional MRI machines require patients to lie flat and can mask causes of pain that come from different movements or positions.

They found that sitting at a 90-degree angle puts significant strain on the spinal discs and back muscles because of the force of gravity.

Slouching or hunching forward is even worse, because it compresses the spinal cord and “essentially just pops your discs backwards.”

But having the upper body at 135 degrees to the thighs in a “relaxed” position alleviates nearly all pressure on the lower spinal discs and causes the least damage over extended periods of time.

The researchers came up with this angle because it allows the discs to be perfectly aligned and resembles lying flat on one’s back, which is the ideal position to avoid back pain.  So it is time to ask your boss to order you a lazy-boy recliner if he really cares about your heatlth! And make sure to spend more time on your hobbies, whether it is a mustang restoration or fishing.

In Passo, Fundo Brazil geneticist Adil Pacheco took blood samples last Friday from three puppies in a poor neighborhood in in southern Brazil to settle a dispute over a claim they were born from a cat.

“It’s rather simple really. If the puppies prove to have 78 chromosomes, they are dogs. If they have 38, they are cats,” said Pacheco, director of the Institute of Biological Sciences of the University of Passo Fundo.

“But I seriously doubt they are feline. Every characteristic about them is canine.”  This is probably a hoax because there is no documented cases of dog and cats being able to mate successfully.