"body" news and stories

The traditional English breakfast includes most (or all) of the following foods: bacon, fried eggs, baked beans, sausages, tomatoes (often fried), mushrooms (also fried), toast, juice and tea or coffee. The breakfast is known as a "full" breakfast not only because it starts with a full plate, but because it leaves you with a full stomach. Despite its size, however, it is still only a meal and won't last forever no matter how you feel for the first hour or so after one.

For a never-ending breakfast, you'll have to consider what one man in Wales did. Dayne Gilbey, 19, volunteered to get a full English breakfast tattooed on the top of his head by tattoo artist Blane Dickinson. Dickinson put out a call for a volunteer because he wanted to do something different and because tattoos are often very personal, it can be hard to find interested parties for more unusual designs. Dickinson came up with the breakfast idea four years ago and has been waiting ever since. The tattoo took six hours to do and, if he had charged for it (which he didn't) would have cost £350 ($685).

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Two British researchers have published a study suggesting that hunger may relate to how men perceive different female body types, BBC News reports. The researchers surveyed 61 male college students coming and going from a university dining hall, first asking them how hungry they were and then asking them to rate a series of photographs of similarly dressed women of varying weights and body types. The half of the group that said they were hungry rated heavier women as more attractive, according to the abstract of the study, which appears in the British Journal of Psychology. The researchers now plan on reversing the study to see how hunger affects female perception of male body types.

The annual meeting of the Institute of Food Technologists, a group of scientists and researchers who study and develop foods, is taking place right now in Florida. During one of the sessions, a food toxicologist revealed that the number of study participants is skewed towards men. Consequently, the results of such studies may not be as reflective of women, or women's physiology, than they are of men's.

The Society for Women's Health Research found that the biggest reasons for non-participation (16% each) are lack of interest and worry about the risk. Until more women decided to participate in these studies, bringing up the numbers to equal men's participation, women should realize that not every result might apply in the same way to them, as metabolism, menstrual cycles, pregnancy, lactation and menopause all might affect the outcome. Consequently, the results of some studies might need to be taken with a grain of salt, even the ones about salt.

The Society for Women's Health Research has more information about current studies and ongoing research.

 

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In the past week, several news sources have run stories about a group of Hungarian builders that drank dry a barrel of rum, only to find a human body in it. Yesterday, MSNBC ran this correction, stating that the story they originally ran, based on a Reuters story, was untrue. Apparently, once the story began to circulate, people recognized it for the urban legend it was. Snopes has several variations on the theme of people (and animals) being pickled in barrels of booze. The current story claimed that the man's body had been stashed in the Jamaican barrel by his wife in an attempt to avoid the cost and paperwork of actually shipping her husband's body home properly.