Marcus Elliott told me that a critical benefit of misogi is what he called “creating impressions in your scrapbook.” “If you’re seeing and doing all the same things over and over, your scrapbook looks pretty empty when you take inventory of your life,” he said. “So we need to do more novel things to start creating more impressions in our scrapbooks

Brown fat is a metabolically active tissue. Brown fat in the cold acts like a furnace that burns our white fat (the type we try to lose with diet and exercise) to generate heat. Working brown fat cranks through more calories than working our muscles and brain. Which is exactly why a team of scientists in the Netherlands think that getting comfortab

Doctors are particularly concerned about the rise of colon cancer. It’s already the third-most-common cancer. But it’s increasingly becoming a cancer of young, otherwise-healthy people. A person born in 1990, for example, has double the risk of colon cancer and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer compared to someone born in 1950. Scientists at the

81.2 YEARS

Our comfortable, supportive-to-the-extreme chairs, couches, and beds of today do the work that our muscles are meant to. And muscle is use-it-or-lose-it stuff. Just ten days of not using a muscle significantly weakens and shrinks it.

“We used to be very active movement generalists,” said Bowman. But we’ve now outsourced most of our movement to machines, chairs, soft beds, and more. When our work does require movement, it’s often specific, repetitive, and destructive. “There are almost no remaining ‘movement generalists’ who are meeting their daily movement needs anymore,” said

About 80 percent of Americans will experience back pain sometime in their life. A quarter of people say they’ve had it in the last few months. It’s the most common place people experience pain, and the most frequent reason people see a doctor or take a sick day from work. Back pain costs our economy $100 billion every year.

But food enjoyment is context dependent. Research shows that the exact same dish can taste better or worse depending on a variety of factors. Like where a person is eating it, who they’re eating it with, how hungry they are, and, apparently, how hard they worked for it.

80 PERCENT