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The popularity of fitness games is influencing gym activities. Bally Total Fitness plans to install video walls with a multi-screen display with a motion-sensing camera. Similar to gesture-based console games on the Nintendo Wii or Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect, the video will incorporate user movements such as arm sweeps and jumps to control the activity on the screen. Continue reading Wave Your Hands in the Air for Bally
What you put into your body after a workout is just as important as the workout itself (especially if you’re trying to gain muscle). But not everyone has the time or patience to concoct their own protein shake after every workout. For on-the-go athletes, FitPro offers its new ready-to-drink real milk protein shake.
Available in Chocolate Milk Shake or Vanilla Milk Shake, the all-natural drink is made with real milk instead of powders and it’s the only ready-to-drink protein shake to carry the “Real Dairy” seal, providing all nine essential nutrients found in natural milk. It’s special packaging also gives it a 12-month shelf life with no refrigeration needed.
Nutrition-wise, the 14-oz. lactose- and gluten-free drink contains 250 calories, 32g of protein, 6g of fat, and 13g of carbs. (By comparison, CytoSport’s 11-oz. Muscle Milk Chocolate packs 230 calories, 22g of protein, 11g of fat, and 11g of carbs.)
FitPro Milk is currently launching in gyms, clubs, and retail channels across the country.
These days everyone preaches about sunscreen. Don’t go outside without it. You may even need it indoors if you’re near a window. But then there’s also bad news that comes from sunscreen.
Chemical sunblock using ingredients such as oxybenzone can be bad for you. Oxybenzone is found to increase the production of dangerous free radicals in the skin. It’s been found to harm or alter DNA, affect hormone balance and the production of thyroid hormones, cause early puberty in children, cause male infertility and potentially lead to breast cancer and skin cancers. Isn’t skin cancer what we’re trying to avoid with sunblock in the first place? Continue reading Reversing the Harmful Effects of Sunscreen
This week Fitbit announced the availability of its beta API, along with new key partners that include RunKeeper, Microsoft, About.Me and others. The Fitbit Tracer device and companion web-based data aggregation technology can be used to track weight, nutrition, exercise, sleeping schedules and more. It is a wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket. It features accelerometer technology to help track daily health activities including steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned and even sleep quality. This data is then wirelessly uploaded to the Fitbit website.
This company has announced that it has raised $9 million in new funding led by The Foundry Group. The big news this week is that the new Fitbit API will allow third-party developers to integrate Fitbit data in their own applications, products and services and also to read and write data for users’ Fitbit activities, food logs and other data in real time. Users can thus connect with fitness and weight loss apps such as RunKeeper and Lose It, and import and publish data into into their apps. About.me users will be able to display real Fitbit stats on their profile through use of the API and Microsoft HealthVault allows users to upload daily activities and sleep sessions into HealthVault. And Last Fall, FitBit announced an integration with Google Health.
We’ve long said that fitness is good when it is done with a partner, and apparently Fitbit thought the same thing.
[Via Techcrunch: Fitbit Partners With RunKeeper, Microsoft, About.Me And Others With New API]
The sports nutrition company behind energy gels, GU continues to bring out new ways to deliver electrolytes for those of us who sweat. One of GU’s new products is GU Brew. An electrolyte tablet, GU Brew gets dropped into 16 ounces of water and gives your liquid more energy.
GU Brew is sweetened with stevia leaf extract as instead of sugar or other substance. Stevia is a plant, a natural sweetener said to be 300 times sweeter than sugar. The South American natural sweetener is said to have some health benefits, though some find it to have a licorice-like aftertaste. It’s worth a try.
Each tablet is 10 calories, zero fat, one gram of carbohydrates and provides 55 mg of potassium to restore your electrolytes. GU Brew comes in 12-count tubes that cost $6.50. Three flavors include Lemon Lime, Orange and Peach Tea.
For the past several years we’ve been warned about plastics. Studies and other sources say plastics made with a BPA material can produce chemicals having estrogenic activity (EA) that can leach into foods. A whole industry of BPA-free plastics was created and now thrives, while justified, on our fears.
A new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a publication of the U.S. National Instutute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health and Department of Health and Human Services. The study’s objective: “To determine whether commercially available plastic resins and products, including baby bottles and other products advertised as BPA-free, release chemicals having EA.”
The study finds that “Almost all commercially available plastic products we sampled, independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source, leached chemicals having reliably-detectable EA, including those advertised as BPA-free. In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than BPA-containing products.”
Before you go buy a stainless-steel canteen and figure out how to incorporate it into your workout, there are a few facts to make clear. The study, as published, is credited to CZ Yang, SI Yaniger, VC Jordan, and GD Bittner. NPR published an article on the study, which offers a history that George Bittner is a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Austin. Bittner also founded the company, CertiChem, that did the testing for the study. That starts to raise a red flag, but it’s not uncommon for professors to be involved in outside companies that are ancillary to their academic work. So we should be concerned about all plastics again, regardless of whether they contain BPA or are free of the substance.
Wait. The graphic in the NPR story is a photo of two bottles from a company called PlastiPure. The caption says “PlastiPure manufactures water bottles that it says have no estrogenic chemicals.” No other mention of PlastiPure occurs in the story. Two days later a follow-up story on NPR titled “Plastic’s New Frontier: No Scary Chemicals” touts PlastiPure for its efforts in manufacturing plastics that have no EA properties, unlike ALL other plastics. The article mentions “This week, scientists from Plastipure and its sister company, CertiChem, published a study of more than 450 plastic products, including many labeled BPA-free. It found that more than 90 percent released chemicals that mimic estrogen.”
Wait! The company that conducted the study is so closely tied to the company claiming to be the savior of plastics. Both were founded by George Bittner, Ph.D. and share several other executives, as does the contributor list on the study.
While the research is important, its validity is in question here. Independent research should be done before we worry about all those BPA-free plastics. It’s easy to pull 450 plastic products for testing and still purposely avoid some candidates because you know they’ll be free of EA, so that your study can pave the path for your PlastiPure company. It’s also astounding that PlastiPure’s web site makes claims such as “PlastiPure is the first and only company developing plastic materials, processes, and products that are safer both for humans and the environment.”
While the study has to be observed, and now we don’t know which plastics are safe and which are not, there are safer bets than others. Companies do test their products rigorously, which the study tries to negate. Check out our water bottle round-up, and read about the research and development behind Specialized’s Purist bottle made from silicon dioxide.
The path to better nutrition is clear. This week MapMyFITNESS, the innovators of web and mobile health and fitness-related software applications, announced the launched its new Nutrition Center. This is a comprehensive resource aimed at helping MapMyFITNESS members get better educated about their food choices and more committed to their nutrition and weight loss goals.
The Nutrition Center features a personalized nutrition dashboard that provides members with a snapshot of their daily caloric budget, consumption and the amount of calories they’ve burned in their workouts, as well as daily water consumption calculator. The center further allows members to track what they eat in the way of meals and snacks to a food log for daily food intake tracking. The site provides searchable database of thousands of foods based on USDA data, and even a “My Favorites” component that gives members the ability to save frequently consumed foods for easy addition to their Food Logs.
“Our Nutrition Center is another innovative and powerful MapMyFITNESS tool aimed at helping our members live healthier and more active lives,” said Robin J. Thurston, chief executive officer of MapMyFITNESS. “Historically, we’ve provided users with the practical tools and content they needed to achieve better fitness; the Nutrition Center ups the ante and delivers a great complement to our existing web and mobile technologies as it provides members with the information and tools they need to make smarter food choices and eat healthier.”
Additionally, new functionality will be rolled out in the coming months to allow members to create new foods to be added to the Nutrition Center’s food database and the option to dial in a more personalized calorie budget. Since the release, MapMyFITNESS members have logged over 100,000 different foods in the Food Log; the entries logged to date suggest members already strive toward healthy eating habits as bananas and apples have been the most entered foods.
Personal story – I love iced tea, and nothing beats several glasses of chilled iced tea following a long bike ride in the summer. I’ll power up with water during the ride, but when I’m back in the kitchen I’m all about the tea. Various friends have commented that I shouldn’t hit the tea following a ride – that it has too much caffeine and sugar. The irony is that some of these friends say this whilst guzzling a sports drink.
Now I feel somewhat vindicated following a recent study from the experts at the Institute of Food Technology, which found that sports drinks and enhanced waters can’t replace tea, coffee and low-fat milk for nutrition and workout recovery.
This is because tea has antioxidants, coffee has polyphenols and milk of course has both protein and vitamin D. Now of course the best advice is to eat some fruits and veggies after a workout too. But as for a post-workout drink, you actually can’t go bad with tea or coffee.
The irony has been that while I’m an active guy, and a self-professed fitness junkie, some colleagues have said, “but you drink so much tea.” The strange twist is that new findings suggest tea can boost immunity – which could explain why I’m rarely sick – and aid weight loss for physically active individuals. I’m pretty lean, so that could explain it.
All this means is that I’ll keep brewing the tea and have an ample supply for that post-ride beverage.
[Via EmaxHealth: Nutrition and workout recovery best from tea, coffee and milk]
Two fitness challenges will push the health agenda at CES 2011 for health insurance agency UnitedHealth Group. Participants will compete for an iPad and Xbox 360 with Kinect over the course of the conference running from January 6-9. Continue reading CES 2011: UnitedHealth Group Plans Fitness Challenges for CES Attendees
The holidays are a time for many things, including seeing family, visiting with friends, eating too much and basically blowing off exercise. That’s probably why come January 2 many people vow to “do it right” and pledge to turn over a new leaf. Maybe one way to start the New Year off right is by better managing your food intake.
One problem say experts is that you can easily shed pounds by reducing intake, but as soon as you go back to old habits – which die hard and quickly – you’re likely to regain the weight. Additionally, people who reportedly lose weight more slowly while increasing the exercise tend to keep the pounds off.
Brian Young realized this, and he’s worked to develop an app that helps you track and burn, hence the Tracknburn app for the iPod and iPhone. It incorporates the BMI formula that “is accurate as it gets,” says Young, who further notes that one of the most popular ways to determine how many calories are needed to sustain the same body weight is to use the body mass index (BMI) and current activity level. Subtract 250 calories a day to lose 1/2 pound per week.
Sounds simple, but Young notes that this formula also changes as you lose weight, making it hard to track over time. The Tracknburn essentially picks up on this, and does the weight loss math for you. This app takes a users individual profile, along with weight goal and helps make responsible choices. It can be used a food log with more than 140,000 common foods to choose from, and by tracking what you can eat, you can more easily lose at the same time. Now that sounds like a winning solution.
Have an iPad? Now you have a way to watch what you cook and how to cook it. Weight Watchers has launched a new app called the Weight Watchers Kitchen Companion, which will take cooks of all levels through the cooking process. Consider this a “soup to nuts” solution as it helps plan a menu, guides you on shopping for ingredients and offers tips on how to make the dish and serve it up.
The app shows you how to lower PointsPlus values in real time to make your recipes healthier, so you can shed the pounds. Articles are available through the app guiding you to key ingredients and foods, whilst discussing common cooking techniques and what to stay away from the bad stuff. You can see the amount of points per menu, and the app offers solutions how to trim the points, cut the fat and reduce the calories in the process. The app is available for free download, for both Weight Watchers members and nonmembers. Continue reading Weight Watching From the iPad
‘Tis the season of holiday gatherings, gift baskets, rich foods and spirits that aren’t always of the holiday variety. It can result in many a New Year’s resolution to indulge less so as to lose some of the end of the year bulge.
How about heading off the bad habits by boning up on some healthy tips? That’s where the 42 Healthy Solutions iPhone app can come in. It was devised by Dr. Craig Koniver, MD, a graduate of Brown University and Jefferson Medical College, who opened the Primary Plus Organic Medicine, LLC in Charleston, SC in 2006 to focus on his expertise in natural medicine. By combining his background in modern, conventional medicine with his unique expertise in organic, natural medicine to treat thousands of patients each year, he created the 42 Healthy Solutions iPhone App. Continue reading Organic Medicine Now on the iPhone
Feeling sluggish? A hit of Red Bull or similar energy drink will solve that, because as the ad campaign says, “it gives you wings.” Of course with as much caffeine as a cup of coffee and a quarter cup of sugar it is no doubt that a can of an energy drink will get the motors running.
According a recent study from the University of Texas Medical School at Houston the drinks can be a problem, and mixed with alcohol can be dangerous or even lethal. Well the sound of a cup of coffee with sugar isn’t a big deal, how many people drink cup after cup after cup of coffee? That’s part of the equation; the other apart is what the combination of herbs and vitamins can do, especially when mixed with concentrations of caffeine. Probably something like a racing heart, hypertension and anxiety, as well as headaches and even problems sleeping. One thing the energy drinks don’t do is actually give you wings. Continue reading Are Energy Drinks Dangerous to One’s Health?