FitRep for Nov. 17 - Off Duty, Military Health and Fitness - Air Force Times

FitRep for Nov. 17

Bite-size weekly health tips

Count calories with a photo

Harvard engineers are developing an app that, from a photo, would tell how many calories are on your plate, the Boston Globe reports. The goal of PlateMate is to use crowd-sourcing to identify foods and portions, and feed that information into software to give a calorie count. The turnaround time from photo to results is an hour, engineers said, but they hope to shave that to a few minutes by the time it’s released — which could be sometime in the next year.

Genes and marathoner mice

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered a gene that allows mice to run beyond the equivalent of a mouse-marathon with few signs of fatigue, Discover Magazine reports. In mice engineered without a gene called IL-15R-alpha, fast-twitch muscles in their legs acted like slow-twitch fibers. Despite running for 3½ miles, the engineered mice showed no exhaustion. In humans, variants of the same gene have been found in world-class endurance competitors.

Avoid depression later

Workouts today could help you avoid depression later in life, Science Daily reports. And it’s not just the exercise that counts, researchers said. Wanting to work out, and feeling good at it, were associated with a lower risk of future depression in a study funded by the European Union.

Commercial weight-loss programs such as Weight Watchers were found to be more effective and less costly than programs run by doctors and specially trained staff, according to a University of Birmingham study published in the British Medical Journal. After 12 weeks, study participants who tried Weight Watchers lost an average of 10 pounds, while those who tried the expert program lost an average of three pounds.

101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy offers wellness tips such as “ignore labels” — that is, dubious nutrition claims on processed food — and “beware artificial hunger” that’s actually stress or anxiety in disguise.