Is this for real? A Brazilian court has ruled that McDonald’s must pay a former franchise manager $17,500 because he gained 65 pounds while he worked there for a dozen years. The 32-year-old man says he felt forced to sample the food each day to make sure the quality was high, because McDonald’s hired “mystery clients” to randomly visit restaurants and report on the food.

The man also says McD’s offered free lunches to employees which added to his caloric intake while he was at work.

I’m not a big fan of McDonald’s, but come on. You’re blaming the chain for making you gain weight? Because you have no control over what you eat, right?


This one is cool :)) It's from Fat Fighter Tv http://fatfightertv.com/blog/2010/10/seriously-a-judge-orders-mcdonalds-to-pay-obese-employee-17-5k/

Babies can sleep through a circus. Older kids may fight bedtime. Andteens -- good luck getting them out of bed on a weekend.

But what about you -- the grown-up? Your sleep life is still changing -- and not just because time is passing.

How does sleep work in adulthood? Does it change -- for better or worse -- as we age? And why do we feel like we never get enough of it?

An average adult needs between 7.5 and 8 hours of sleep per night. “But many people can function with 6 hours' sleep, and there also some who need 9 hours or more,” says Sudhansu Chokroverty, MD, professor and co-chair of neurology and program director for clinical neurophysiology and sleep medicine at the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute at JFK Medical Center in Edison, N.J. “The amount of sleep needed to function the next day varies from individual to individual, and is determined genetically and hereditarily.”

Grown-Up Sleep

The biggest, most dramatic change in our deep sleep and satisfaction with sleep takes place as we move from adolescence into young adulthood.

“Most adolescents feel like they sleep terrifically, and if you try to wake them up, you’re not even sure they’re alive,” says Robert Simpson, MD, assistant professor in the University of Utah's division of pulmonary medicine and a sleep medicine specialist. “That’s because they have lots of what we call deep, slow-wave sleep.”

Sleep is broadly split into two big categories: REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when we’re dreaming, and non-REM sleep. Non-REM sleep moves through several, progressively deeper stages:

• Stage I: a light doze, not very restorative
• Stage II: middle sleep, restorative
• Stage III: slow-wave deep sleep, the most restorative of all

“There’s a fairly precipitous decline in deep slow-wave sleep through the teen years into the early 20s,” Simpson says. “That tends to be replaced with middle sleep, stage II.”

It's Not Just You

You're not just imagining it: As you’ve gotten older, your sleep has probably become less satisfying and less restorative.

To some degree, that may be a part of the natural aging process, but it might also have something to do with your health overall.

“Deterioration in sleep follows general health to a closer degree than it does true chronological age,” Simpson says. “If we track people over time and ask them, ‘How’s your sleep?’ the degree to which it deteriorates or improves over time tends to mirror their overall health.”


Read the rest of the article here: http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/adult-sleep-needs-and-habits?src=RSS_PUBLIC

It's been linked to lowered risk of diabetes, and contains soluble fiber, the type that can help lower cholesterol.

     

Coffee lovers may be raising their cups—and perhaps eyebrows—at the recent news (in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry) that the drink contains soluble fiber, the type that can help lower cholesterol. With about 1 gram per cup, coffee's fiber impact is modest. But the report is the latest in a growing stream of positive news about coffee.

Some of the most promising findings come from studies of diabetes. When Harvard researchers combined data from nine studies involving more than 193,000 people, they found that regular coffee drinkers had a significantly lower risk of type 2 diabetes than those who abstained. The more they drank, the lower their risk.

And, despite coffee's reputation for being bad for the heart, recent epidemiologic studies haven't found a connection; some even suggest coffee can be protective. A study in February's American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported that healthy people 65 and over who drank four or more cups of caffeinated beverages daily (primarily coffee) had a 53 percent lower risk of heart disease than non-coffee-drinkers.

It's even more beguiling when you consider that the immediate effects of drinking coffee tend to go in the opposite direction, raising heart rate and blood pressure and temporarily making cells more resistant to insulin. "But those effects are probably short-lived, as people develop a tolerance," explains Frank Hu, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, who has studied coffee extensively. "In the long term, beneficial components in coffee may have stronger, more lasting effects."

How coffee might work isn't clear; the studies weren't designed to identify cause-and-effect relationships. Antioxidants, such as chlorogenic acid (related to polyphenols in grapes), are likely players: coffee has more of them per serving than blueberries do, making it the top source of antioxidants in our diets. Antioxidants help quell inflammation, which might explain coffee's effect in inflammation-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Magnesium in coffee might help make cells more sensitive to insulin. And caffeine seems to have its own beneficial effects; the diabetes studies found that those who drank regular coffee had lower risks of the disease than decaf drinkers. Caffeinated-coffee drinking has also been linked with reduced risk of Parkinson's disease, gallstones, cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Bottom Line: For healthy adults, having two or three cups of joe daily generally isn't harmful and it may have health perks.

"I wouldn't recommend drinking coffee to prevent disease," says Hu. Exceeding one's caffeine tolerance—which varies—can cause irritability, headache and insomnia. (Signs you might be overconsuming: Yelling at co-workers. Watching infomercials at 2 a.m.) The temporary rise in heart rate and blood pressure could cause problems for people with heart disease, and new moms should be aware that caffeine passes into breast milk. Hu has no plans to change his own two-cup-a-day habit. "For most people who enjoy coffee, there's no reason to cut back."