It’s a gateway to cigarette smoking; explain the risks of vaping to your teens.
The Breathe Teen Choice Awards are given for smoking in films. In 2015, Bill Murray won for the PG-13 rated “St. Vincent,” in which he puffed and puffed around kids. Seems 38 percent of PG-13 movies feature smoking (often, a lot).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that making an R-rating mandatory for any movie with smoking would reduce the number of teen smokers by 18 percent and prevent 1 million deaths from smoking among children alive today.
We hope they start counting the number of times e-cigs get fired up too. Just as cigarette smoking in movies leads kids to start smoking, vaping on the silver screen does too. And, according to a new study, teens who vape are six times more likely to smoke cigarettes later on than kids who never vape. A 2015 CDC survey of over 15,000 high-schoolers found that 24 percent had used an e-cigarette in the past 30 days. That means an enormous amount of teens are on the road to becoming tobacco smokers.
So if your teen thinks vaping is cool and harmless, explain just how risky it can be. You sure wouldn’t ignore cigarette smoking if he or she did that; don’t ignore vaping either.
Make change happen
When David Bowie penned the song “Changes,” he was commenting on how challenging change can be.
For example, while 51 percent of Americans say they’d like to lose weight and get healthier, only around 26 percent are actively trying. And just about 20 percent of weight-shedding folks lose 10 percent of their body weight and keep it off for a year.
No wonder researchers (and we) keep trying to ID changes that will help you become successful weight-losers and healthy weight-maintainers. Some smart and simple changes include: eating a diet lower in calories and bad fats; eating breakfast; maintaining a consistent eating schedule; and recruiting a weight-loss or exercise buddy.
But how do you successfully follow through with those desired changes?
A study in Frontiers of Psychology gathered 44,000 folks and had them try different techniques that might make it easier to successfully accomplish a desired task. They found that the biggest boost came from using a brief self-talk (“I can do it!”) just before doing the task. Researchers suspect that the pat-on-theback works best because it stimulates pleasant emotions, arouses interest in success and increases intensity about meeting your goal.
So adopt a mantra or make your own. Try “I can make this change, and I can make it stick!” Or before every meal or when confronted with between-meal snacks, tell yourself: “I’m makin’ it stick, because I can. I can do this.” It works!
Q: I just heard that eating insects is actually good for you. I thought they were a food of last resort, like if you are starving, right?
Dick B., Lafayette, Indiana
A: Well, sometimes it can be a food of last resort; during the Khmer Rouge period, many Cambodians survived by eating wild tarantulas, minus fangs and poisonous sacks. Today in that country fried tarantulas are a delicacy, and they’re becoming scarce.
In addition to tarantulas, many insects — think worms, grasshoppers and crickets — are packed with protein and void of saturated fat. In fact, 80 percent of the world’s population includes insects in their diet, while here in the U.S. entomophagy (eating insects) is becoming very hip.
Grasshoppers are showing up in Tex-Mex, and dragonflies, crickets and cicadas are showing up in other dishes.
Only 0.1 percent of the 5 million known insects are harmful, according to Professor Arnold van Huis of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. So, Dick, feasting on these creepy crawlers is in. Have a backyard barbecue and show your friends how cool you are.
And remember, besides having the same amount of protein as beef, insects have a whole lot less saturated fat and they dish up loads of omega-3s. Plus, insects don’t produce anywhere near the greenhouse gasses livestock do. They’re fart-free (mostly) and eco-friendly.