Cool Stuff I've read this week

I like to read a lot. From health and fitness, to psychology, science and philosophy to pop culture geekery I'm a fairly voracious consumer of written content, particularly online. And if you're a regular reader of this blog I'd guess you are too. But with the huge volume of content published online on a daily basis its sometimes hard to sort through and find the good stuff. So I thought I'd try and help in some small way by filtering through the crap and showing some of the particularly interesting stuff I've stumbled across on the interwebs this week.

(This may or may not become a regular weekly thing, I fear commitment and have a low threshold for boredom so I'm not making any promises)

1- Here's a good summary of the debate about government regulation of sugar that was doing the rounds this week. I haven't made my mind up about this yet to be honest, though theres certainly a case to be made that sugar is at least as harmful as othe rgovernment regulated substances like alcohol and cigarettes.

http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/should-we-regulate-sugar-like-alcohol

2- A great summary of the current research around antioxidant supplementation. The whole "antioxidants good, free radicals bad" is a total oversimplification, with some high quality research suggesting that snitioxidant supplementation is worse than useless. 

http://workout911.com/?p=3680

3- A cool little piece on Derren Brown's blog about imposter syndrome and the Duning Krueger effect. This is something I've planned to write about for a while as this phenomenon runs rampant in the health and fitness industry, but here's a good intro to the concept-

http://derrenbrown.co.uk/blog/2012/02/ubiquity-impostor-syndrome/

4-Very interesting article with some very early stage research into intermittent fasting and cancer treatment. I'm not suggesting for a second that IF is a magic bullet, though I am a fan, but this is a good read that further builds the case for including it in some format.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/02/fasting-and-cancer?fsrc=gn_ep

5- And finally, a little plug for myself. This is a brief article I wrote for another trainers newsletter detailing some of the factors I need to take into account when dealing with our typical client base, namely high stress, time poor city workers. Enjoy!

http://archive.aweber.com/fittraindown/7Datw/h/_Fitness_Training_Downloads.html