Health
Finding good health news amidst a pandemic can be quite daunting. That’s not the case with The Optimist Daily, where positive news is in high supply. Our Health section covers the latest good news from the health sector, featuring solutions ranging from mental and physical health to immunity, nutrition, and cutting edge medical research.
Norway is slashing food waste through selling out-of-date produce
It is well-known that “best by dates” on produce and food packages are mere guidelines. The dates don’t mean that the food will be bad for consumption by the given date. Nonetheless, supermarkets and consumers throw away a lot of food based on these dates. Norway is now aggressively fighting Read More...
Healing human tissue with “cotton candy”
It looks like it but, no, this is not cotton candy. Instead of sugar, researchers pour polymers into a cotton candy machine to make a heap of wispy strands. The polymer fibers are combined with hydrogel into a substance placed on wounds to keep them moist and help them heal. When the fibers Read More...
The next best thing for your gut goes back to the very beginning
Research shows that inflammation in the gut is the beginning of many diseases. That makes healing the gut a primary focus of medicine. The initial healthy status of the gut of a baby comes from its mother’s breast milk. Apparently, sugars known as human milk oligosaccharides play a key role. Now, Read More...
Google buys startup that turns smartphones into health diagnostic tools
Google has bought Senosis Health, a startup that turns smartphones into medical devices and collects various health stats. The Senosis apps can monitor lung health and hemoglobin counts, among other things, using functions on a smartphone including its accelerometer, microphone, flash and camera. Read More...
Here are the health benefits of pepper
Peppercorn is native to the tropical evergreen rain forest of the Malabar region (State of Kerala in South India) from where it spread to rest of the world through Indian and Arab traders. A judicious pinch of pepper is sufficient to make a world of difference to many soups, stews, marinades and Read More...
EU certifies Natural Cycles app to help women with birth control
There are many apps that help women with tracking their monthly cycles. However, Natural Cycles is the first app certified as a form of contraception by the European Union. Natural Cycles uses a specially developed algorithm and other factors, including temperature, to determine which days a woman Read More...
Sick tweets: Twitter can help track public health
The big data of social media can be insightful in many ways—as advertisers know. In this case, researchers sought to understand patterns of how people behave differently on social media when they are sick. They found that monitoring Twitter trends can help doctors quickly identify a rise of Read More...
Nonvisual photoreception: Parts of your body can “see” without your eyes
Without the sun there would be no life on the planet. So, it makes sense that our bodies use light in more ways than to see with our eyes. Scientists have discovered that many animals—including human beings—have specialized light-detecting molecules in unexpected places, outside of the eyes. Read More...
The promise of immunotherapy as cancer treatment
Immunotherapy is a promising new approach to cancer treatment that uses a series of precision strikes to disintegrate cancer from within the body itself. Doctors use gene therapy to train a patient's immune system to recognize and destroy their cancer in the same way it dispatches bacteria and Read More...
Aboriginal meditation is being used to heal minds in the modern world
From the tiny community of Nauiyu, south of Darwin, Miriam Rose Baumann is preparing to meet her next group of interstate visitors. "It's not a tour where you have to pack your bags and get ready to jump on a bus that's going to be leaving at 6:00am in the morning, to take you to places and be Read More...