water

Many of us search the Internet when we need a quick answer to a health question, and each year Google analyzes the most common health queries, both in this country and globally.

When summer finally rolls around and you have some extra daylight on your hands, it’s a good time to escape to somewhere wet. It could be to a beach, lake, river or even a neighborhood pool. But my advice is to skip all the places everyone goes and try something new.

News, discoveries and ... fun

During World War II, John Spence was the kind of hero who belonged in a comic book or movie serial. He was a member of an elite, top-secret team of combat divers called "frogmen," trained by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today's Central Intelligence Agency, for critical but highly dangerous missions - from rescuing downed airmen before they could be captured to planting explosives on underwater barriers set up by the enemy to hinder beach landings by U.S. troops.

Rarely does a piece of mail from our local county government contain good news. It's typically a property tax bill or a notice that our trash-collection fees are going up again. But the other day I received news from the county and it made my inner cheapskate sit up and take notice.

 Perhaps so. Researchers studied middle-aged adults who were placed on a low-fat, low-calorie diet (1,200 calories for women and 1,500 for men). After three months, the subjects who drank two glasses of water before breakfast, lunch and dinner lost an average of 15.5 pounds, compared to the non-water drinkers who lost 11 pounds. The difference occurred because the adults who drank water ate 75-90 calories less per meal.

Talk about the miracle of brilliant marketing: Did you know most bottled water is actually filtered municipal water? Put it in a pretty bottle, throw on a sexy label and mention something about a mountain spring, and we're willing to shell out  2000 times the amount of money it costs for something we could get virtually free (from whence it came to begin with!) Eee-gads have we been hoodwinked!

I always love finding stories and advice like this from a reputable source - this time from CNN and Health.com.