Eating well may count more than exercise for weight loss: study

                                                                          (By Lizette Borreli on 2/12/17 AT 9:10 AM.)

      We’ve all heard that to lose weight we need to do two things: eat less, exercise more. This makes sense: Burning more calories than we consume will lead to weight loss. But this exercise-based approach provides only short-term results. Now, researchers at Loyola University of Chicago confirm that a healthy diet, not exercise, is the key to losing weight – and keeping it off.

      “Our study results indicate that physical activity may not protect you from gaining weight,” said Lara Dugas, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, in a statement.

      Previous research has found exercise does help people lose weight by burning fat. A 10-month study split 141 obese or overweight people into three groups to see how cardio affected them – group 1 had to burn 400 calories doing cardio, 5 days a week; group 2 had to burn 600 calories doing cardio, 5 days a week; and group 3 did no exercise. Most participants lost 4.3 percent of their body weight in group 1; group 2 lost a little more at 5.7 percent; and the control group actually gained 0.5 percent.

      The benefits of exercise on weight are notable, but most studies don't take into account its behavioral effects. For example, working out makes people hungrier, which means they are more likely to consume more calories. This suggests how much and what we eat has a bigger impact on our weight than exercise.

      In the new study, published in Peer J, Dugas and her colleagues examined about 2,000 adults from the U.S. and four other countries: Ghana, South Africa, Jamaica and Seychelles, to measure their physical activity levels and weight change throughout the course of three years. Participants wore tracking devices – accelerometers – on their waists for a week, to track their energy expenditure and step count. Weight, height and body fat were also measured at baseline, one year and two years after.

      In the beginning, Ghana participants had the lowest average weights (139 pounds for both men and women), and Americans the highest weights (202 pounds for women, 206 pounds for men). Ghanaians were more fit han Americans; 76 Ghanaian men and 44 percent Ghanaian women met the U.S. Surgeon General physical activity guidelines, while only 44 percent of American men and 20 percent of American women met the guidelines. Adults need 2 hours and 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, like brisk walking, each week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

      Surprisingly, participants with higher rates of physical activity actually gained more weight than those with lower rates. American men who met the guidelines gained a half pound per year, while American men who did not meet the guidelines lost 0.6 pounds. This shows there's no significant relationship between sedentary time at baseline, and subsequent weight gain or weight loss. The only factors that were significantly linked to weight at baseline were age and gender.

      “From our study it is not evident that higher volumes of PA [physical activity] alone are protective against future weight gain, and by deduction our data suggest that other environmental factors such as the food environment may have a more critical role”, concluded the researchers.

      Exercise-focused weight loss regimens yield low success rates because we tend to poorly estimate calories we consume and calories we burn. For example, a 2010 study found when participants were asked to consume the amount of food they believed they burned in calories, they ended up eating two to three times the amount of calories they burned. This suggests calorie expenditure doesn’t really count for much.

      Diet is a major factor in weight control; portion sizes and what we're eating is crucial to maintaining a healthy body weight. To lose weight and improve health, we need to both eat well and find the time to exercise.

(Available: http://www.newsweek.com/eating-well-count-more-exercise-weight-loss-554821.) 

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      American jazz is a trove of sounds borrowed from such varied sources as American and African folk music, European classical music, and Christian gospel songs. One of the recognizable traits of jazz is its use of improvisation: certain parts of the music are written out and played the same way by various performers, and other improvised parts are created spontaneously during a performance and vary widely from performer to performer.

      The root form of jazz was ragtime, lively songs or rags performed on the piano, and the best-known of the ragtime performers and composers was Scott Joplin. Born in the 1868 to former slaves, Scott Joplin earned his living from a very early age playing the piano in bars around the Mississippi. One of these regular jobs was in the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Missouri. It was there that he began writing the more than 500 compositions that he was to produce, the most famous of which was “The Maple Leaf Rag”.

        (Longman Preparation Course for the TOEFL, Deborah Philips Adapted.)

Com base no texto abaixo, responda à pergunta:

    Working for the Navy can be a very interesting career choice. It will start with specialist training, both at sea and on-shore. As a result, you will develop practical and technical skills and will find yourself equipped with the confidence to interact in a team.

    The Navy offers a lot of career options - from technical to non-technical posts, and for officer to civilian posts. There are hundreds of j ob opportunities available. But some positions come with high responsibilities.

    For instance, Navy Electronics Technicians (ETs) are an exclusive group of professionals specially trained in electronic engineering and computer skills. They can operate and manage the electronic system s of the world’s most advanced ships and airplanes.

    Another example of a Navy career is a Navy Hull Technician (HT). HTs maintain a ship’s marine sanitation system and also repair and maintain the small boats found aboard Navy ships.

    Finally, Marine Technicians (MTs) operate, maintain and repair the ship’s machinery, as well as look after the power generation and distribution, and electrical control systems of ships.

    Sound good so far? Take a look at the pathways to careers at sea. And find out where a j ob at sea could take you. W here do you see yourself? Click here.

(adaptado de http://www.careersatsea.org/)

Six things I learned from riding in a Google self-driving car

1 - Human beings are terrible drivers.

      We drink. We doze. We text. In the US, 30,000 people die from automobile accidents every year. Traffic crashes are the primary cause of death worldwide for people aged 15-24, and during a crash, 40% of drivers never even hit the brakes. We’re flawed organisms, barreling around at high speeds in vessels covered in glass, metal, distraction, and death. This is one of Google’s “moonshots” – to remove human error from a job which, for the past hundred years, has been entirely human.

2 - Google self-driving cars are timid.

        The car we rode in did not strike me as dangerous. It drove slowly and deliberately, and I got the impression that it’s more likely to annoy other drivers than to harm them. In the early versions they tested on closed courses, the vehicles were programmed to be highly aggressive. Apparently during these tests, which involved obstacle courses full of traffic cones and inflatable crash-test objects, there were a lot of screeching brakes, roaring engines and terrified interns.

3 - They’re cute.

        Google’s new fleet was intentionally designed to look adorable. Our brains are hardwired to treat inanimate (or animate) objects with greater care, caution, and reverence when they resemble a living thing. By turning self-driving cars into an adorable Skynet Marshmallow Bumper Bots, Google hopes to spiritually disarm other drivers. I also suspect the cuteness is used to quell some of the road rage that might emerge from being stuck behind one of these things. They’re intended as moderate-distance couriers, not openroad warriors, so their max speed is 25 miles per hour.

4 - It’s not done and it’s not perfect.

      Some of the scenarios autonomous vehicles have the most trouble with are the same human beings have the most trouble with, such as traversing four-way stops or handling a yellow light. The cars use a mixture of 3D laser-mapping, GPS, and radar to analyze and interpret their surroundings, and the latest versions are fully electric with a range of about 100 miles. Despite the advantages over a human being in certain scenarios, however, these cars still aren’t ready for the real world. They can’t drive in the snow or heavy rain, and there’s a variety of complex situations they do not process well, such as passing through a construction zone. Google is hoping that, eventually, the cars will be able to handle all of this as well (or better) than a human could.

5 - I want this technology to succeed, like… yesterday.

        I’m biased. Earlier this year my mom had a stroke. It damaged the visual cortex of her brain, and her vision was impaired to the point that she’ll probably never drive again. This reduced her from a fully-functional, independent human being with a career and a buzzing social life into someone who is homebound, disabled, and powerless. When discussing self-driving cars, people tend to ask many superficial questions. They ignore that 45% of disabled people in the US still work. They ignore that 95% of a car’s lifetime is spent parked. They ignore how this technology could transform the lives of the elderly, or eradicate the need for parking lots or garages or gas stations. They dismiss the entire concept because they don’t think a computer could ever be as good at merging on the freeway as they are. They ignore the great, big, beautiful picture: that this technology could make our lives so much better.

6 - It wasn’t an exhilarating ride, and that’s a good thing.

        Riding in a self-driving car is not the cybernetic thrill ride one might expect. The car drives like a person, and after a few minutes you forget that you’re being driven autonomously. You forget that a robot is differentiating cars from pedestrians from mopeds from raccoons. You forget that millions of photons are being fired from a laser and interpreting, processing, and reacting to the hand signals of a cyclist. You forget that instead of an organic brain, which has had millions of years to evolve the cognitive ability to fumble its way through a four-way stop, you’re being piloted by an artificial one, which was birthed in less than a decade. The unfortunate part of something this transformative is the inevitable, ardent stupidity which is going to erupt from the general public. Even if in a few years self-driving cars are proven to be ten times safer than human-operated cars, all it’s going to take is one tragic accident and the public is going to lose their minds. There will be outrage. There will be politicizing. There will be hashtags. I say look at the bigger picture. All the self-driving cars currently on the road learn from one another, and possess 40 years of driving experience. And this technology is still in its infancy.

(Adapted from:: <http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car> . 21/08/2016.)