Customers Order Less with Calorie Counts
Restaurants might hate putting calorie counts on their menu, but those numbers are serving their purpose. A study from Cornell found that people who ate at full-service restaurants that listed calories on menus consumed fewer calories than those who ordered off menus without calorie information. The difference typically came when guests ordered appetizers or entrees with fewer calories, as the dessert and drink orders typically remained the same.
The difference wasn’t huge—three percent, or just 45 calories—but it shows up in the numbers, which mostly appears due to the requirement by the Affordable Care Act of 2010 that said restaurants with 20 or more locations must post the information, are having an effect on customer habits. Surprisingly, the majority of the 5,550 diners that participated in the study supported calorie counts on the menus.
HIIT Workouts: Same Cell Benefits in Less Time
No one wants to slog in the gym for hours, so any research that shows that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) can do the job just as well is a welcome development. A small study published in the American Journal of Physiology—Regulatory, Integrative, and Comparative Physiology has done just that, concluding that HIIT in the form of sprint cycling is just as effective as longer workouts in improving mitochondrial cell function.
The researchers noted that just two minutes of sprint cycling evoked the same cell responses as 30 minutes of steady-state exercise. “This suggests that exercise may be prescribed according to individual preferences while still generating similar signals known to confer beneficial metabolic adaptions,” the study authors wrote in a release. “These findings have important implications for improving our understanding of how exercise can be used to enhance metabolic health in the general population.”
CDC Predicts Alzheimer’s, Dementia Rate to Double in 40 Years
An increasingly longer lifespan of Americans may be a double-edged sword, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the rate of Alzheimer’s Disease or a related dementia is likely to more than double by 2060. This means the prevalence of the diseases could rise to 13.9 million, or 3.3 percent of Americans, from the 2014 reported rate of five million.
Alzheimer’s is currently the fifth-leading cause of death for people age 65 and over, as well as the six-leading cause of death for all Americans. The CDC’s report also highlighted racial and ethnic disparities, noting that 13.8 percent of black Americans suffered from Alzheimer’s in 2014, versus 12.2 percent of Hispanics, 10.3 percent of Caucasians, and 8.4 percent of Asians and Pacific Islanders.