The benefits of avocados goes all the way to the pit.
You probably know that an avocado’s creamy flesh contains good-foryou monounsaturated fats, including odd-numbered omega fatty acids that reduce lousy LDL cholesterol, and is rich in vitamin C, potassium and vitamin E. But chances are you, like the rest of the country, have overlooked the health benefits crammed into the pit and its brown, papery husk.
In South America, the pit, loaded with antioxidants, has been used for generations to treat inflammation, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Want to try it? Chop up an avocado pit and place in a tea diffuser with boiling water.
The husk of the pit is even more beneficial — it contains a gold mine of more than 130 nutritious compounds in its oil and wax. Recent research has scientists speculating that the medicinal compounds within them eventually could be used to treat cancer, heart disease and other conditions. You can crumble the husk into a salad, add it to a smoothie or just munch it (bitter alert) as a snack.
Keep road rage in check
Road rage has become increasingly dangerous: Over a seven-year period, it was linked to 218 murders and 12,610 injuries. Here are a few tips to help you avoid it.
Don’t cause road rage in others
• Pay attention (no texting or putting on makeup!) to traffic flow, and be considerate; 49 percent of road rage incidents are caused by a distracted or inattentive driver.
• Don’t speed or change lanes recklessly. Signal! Always check your blind spot.
Don’t react to bad behavior
• Don’t honk your horn, flash your lights or make obscene gestures at other drivers to express your discontent.
• If someone cuts you off or misses moving through a light because they are texting, practice anger management, such as deep breathing and redirecting your thoughts to more pleasant topics.
• If enraging traffic is a daily occurrence, consider carpooling or taking public transportation.
Remember that road rage — assault or endangering other people or property with a motor vehicle — is a criminal offense.
Color blindness
Q: I just met someone who claimed to be color blind to certain blues. I thought being color blind meant you couldn’t see any colors? Is he color blind or not?
Jamie Q., Austin
A: Your friend could have a type of color blindness called tritanopia, or tritanomaly — which means blues appear as green and yellows appear as violet or light gray. There’s also red color blindness (protanopia, or protanomaly), in which reds appear as black and certain shades of orange, yellow and green appear as yellow. And green color blindness (deuteranopia, or deuteranomaly) makes greens appear as beige and reds appear brownish-yellow. Total color blindness — a world that’s only black and white — is rare. Although color blindness usually is a genetic condition, it also can result from a brain or eye injury. Inherited color blindness in Northern Europeans, the group most affected, is present in 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women.
How the eye sees color
When light bounces off an object and enters your eye, the light stimulates your retina’s rod and cone cells, which contain red, green or blue photoreceptors. The photoreceptors work together, just like the red, green and blue ink cartridges in an inkjet printer, to produce a lush color image. That’s trichromatic vision. Color blindness is the result of a malfunction in one or more of those photoreceptors.
There’s no cure for color blindness, so early diagnosis is important. Kids have a tough time in school if they don’t understand why other kids are seeing things differently than they do. There are, however, some workarounds: Special lenses sometimes can improve red-green color blindness, but only in bright light, outdoors. And there are lots of apps for Android and iPhones to enhance colors or help with tasks like picking out clothes or ripe fruit. If you want to test your child or yourself for color blindness, go to nei.nih. gov and search for online tests.