How much do your taste buds have to do with your weight? Anything? Everything?

In a recent study researchers compared taste sensitivity in obese children and adolescents to that of healthy weight children and adolescents.  According to this study, taste sensitivity is linked to weight.

Children and adolescents who were obese had less sensitive taste buds.  That means for obese children sweet foods tasted less intensely sweet, bitter foods were milder and salt was not as readily perceived.

What do these differences in taste perception mean?

It’s one of the most poignant websites you’ll ever visit. Seriously, check it out and try not to be moved or get teary-eyed. (I have. Every. single. time.)

DearPhotograph.com features photo submissions from all over the world. The premise: Individuals visit the original place where a meaningful photo was taken. They hold up the old photo and snap away. Then they add a caption, beginning with “Dear photograph.”

CBS named Dear Photograph the No. 1 website in 2011. TIME Magazine ranked it No. 7 in its list of top 50 websites.

The site also has spawned a breathtaking book, Dear Photograph, which features never-before-seen photos.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Taylor Jones, the founder and curator of Dear Photograph. Below, Jones shares how he started the site, why it’s struck a cord with so many, the submission that’ll always stay with him and much more.

“Hey, that’s not fair!”

Do you remember the first time you heard or said these words? Maybe it was while playing hopscotch, tag, or “Monopoly” with your friends or siblings. Or, like me, you may recall that expression from the school playground, when someone broke the rules of the touch football game. The fact is, most of us grew up in a culture that places great value on “fairness” and “playing by the rules.”

There’s just one problem with this noble ideal: the world simply doesn’t work that way. As the biblical book of Ecclesiastes observed, “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise… but time and chance happens to them all.”

Indeed, the physicists tell us that the universe tends toward maximum disorder, or “entropy” — not fairness! And yet, most of us react to injustice, mistreatment, and even natural disasters with a sense that we have been treated unfairly — as the B.J. Thomas song put it, we feel that “Somebody done somebody wrong!”

Every minute counts.

Every minute is an opportunity to experience joy, calm, peace or fun — no matter what you’re doing, no matter where you are. The key is to be mindful.

“If there is a single secret to one-minute mindfulness, it is this: live the next sixty seconds as if your whole life depended on them, with a sense of urgency and excitement, or as if you had just arrived in a foreign land where there is nothing expected, hackneyed, or taken for granted,” writes author and psychotherapist Donald Altman, MA, LPC, in his book One Minute Mindfulness: 50 Simple Ways to Find Peace, Clarity, and New Possibilities in a Stressed-Out World.

In the book, Altman features exercises for all areas of our lives: at home; at work; for relationships; for health and well-being; and for nature and spirituality. He helps readers go from our usual autopilot ways to opening our eyes and understanding the magic in every minute or moment.

Here are five one-minute activities from One Minute Mindfulness that you can practice every day to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Allison Winn Scotch’s novel, “Time of My Life,” is the perfect read for those of us who are prone to the “what if game.”

What if we can change our past? What if we can go back in time and do it all differently? Would our future be better? Would we be happier?

Scotch effectively illustrates how our past leads us to exactly where we need to be.

In “Time of My Life,” the protagonist, Jillian, appears to be going through the motions of motherhood after the birth of her first child, Katie, and can’t help but feel something is not quite right in her suburban life and marriage. She and her husband, Henry, no longer connect the way they used to, and she sometimes finds herself pining for what once was — the intense relationship she had with her ex-boyfriend, Jackson, and the fulfilling work she did at an advertising agency in New York City.

So when Jillian goes to get a massage and her masseuse “unblocks her chi,” where she travels back seven years into the past, she is very content to embark on a second chance.

Father’s Day rolls around again, and I am brought back 50 years to the smell of spent cigars and sweaty T-shirts in the mid-June heat. We argued about those T-shirts often and rancorously, my father and I. He favored the sleeveless, white-cotton variety, which I thought looked ridiculous.

“Why don’t you wear the right T-shirts?” my father would ask, with genuine bafflement. “You’ll be a lot cooler in the summer!”

“I like colored T-shirts, with sleeves!” I’d shout back. “Leave me the hell alone!”

I was 14, and anything but the son my father would have chosen. He was a natural athlete who loved nothing better than starting up a softball game with the kids at Kibbe Park, who knew him simply as “Jake.” He liked crooning along with “Dean Martin Sings Parisian,” channeling Groucho Marx (“I hate to be Russian, but I Mos-cow…”) and downing a cold glass of Genesee Beer with a few slices of pepperoni.

I was a studious nerd, given to spouting verses from Dylan Thomas and listening to Simon and Garfunkle, alone in my room. I hated almost anything connected with sports and, as my classmates frequently pointed out on the baseball diamond, I threw “like a girl.” On some level, I probably sensed that the arguments my father and I had over T-shirts were really about the kind of kid I was, and the kind he wanted me to be.

I couldn’t help but notice the new TV advertisements for a service called “Lumosity,” a company that suggests you can “reclaim your brain” by simply playing their brain training games (at only $15/month). Sounds like fun!

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve written about these kinds of programs (more than once).

So I checked out Lumosity’s research backing to see if anything new has come down the pike to support the use of these kinds of cognitive games to help ordinary adults — not senior citizens or others suffering from mild cognitive impairment. In a nutshell, is there a solid research base to suggest that you can improve your brain’s fitness with these programs?

The answer should surprise no one.

Many doctors appear to believe they aren’t human — and don’t have normal human needs like the rest of us. At least according to two new studies recently released.

In an opinion piece published in Sunday’s New York Times, researcher Leeat Granek shares the results of two studies that suggest to her that, “Not only do doctors experience grief, but the professional taboo on the emotion also has negative consequences for the doctors themselves, as well as for the quality of care they provide.”

A different study released by the JAMA journal, Archives of Surgery, last week found that residents don’t get as much sleep as ordinary professionals get — which directly impacts their ability to concentrate and be mentally attentive.

Combined, these studies add to the picture that’s been painted for years by research — that doctors believe they are somehow “super human” and beyond the reach of normal human needs, for both their body and their mind. It’s a disturbing picture, and one that the medical education establishment needs to remedy sooner rather than later.

Many of us are constantly in need of …

Caffeine is the most widely consumed stimulant in the world.  We drink it in our coffee, we consume it in our cans of Coke and Pepsi. People take in so much of this drug, they rarely think twice about it.

Caffeine is found naturally in so many of our foods and beverages, we take it for granted. On top of that, it’s often referenced for its positive effects on attention and mental alertness.

Not only is caffeine found abundantly available in natural and supplemented foods and beverages, you’ll also find it in products sold over the counter for fatigue, migraines and colds.

But what are caffeine’s effects on our thinking? Is it helping or hindering our thought processes? Let’s find out…

Students and life-long learners alike: at what time of day do you usually study?

When I was in college, I worked a few days per week as a campus computer lab monitor. (In other words, I got paid a few bucks to sit in a room with 30 computers and make sure that the printer didn’t jam up.)

I usually worked the closing (read: midnight) shift, and thanks to an incredibly competent cohort of classmates, I never had much work to do. If the printer jammed, the student who’d jammed the machine would usually walk right over, pull out the offending accordion-shaped piece of computer paper, and print their work again.

Call this job a study hall for the college set.

And study I did.

“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.” 
~Thich Nhat Hanh

 “You have to make the mind run the body.”
~General George S. Patton Jr.

A recently published article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology by Kearney, McDermott, Malte, Martinez, and Simpson (2012) may have broad implications for veterans suffering with symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 

These researchers demonstrated that engagement in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) showed significant improvements after six months in reducing soldiers’ symptoms of PTSD, depression, behavioral activation (the ability to engage in activities to achieve a goal in spite of aversive symptoms), and self-acceptance.