Mental Health

Five foods to reduce stress

Some types of foods and key vitamins and minerals can help you unwind by boosting levels of the feel-good hormone serotonin, lowering blood pressure and reducing cortisol levels. The low-GI carbohydrates found in wholegrain breads, pasta, noodles and brown rice are among the best stress-busters. But here are five other types of food to calm [...]

Special K for depression?

"It's a completely different mechanism. And the focus is on really rapidly helping someone get out of a depressive episode." This new mechanism isn't the result of a recently discovered chemical compound but the reapplication of an existing drug – ketamine. Used in both human and veterinary science as an anaesthetic agent, it's also taken [...]

Party culture and the hangover of sexual assault

An Australian-first study based in Wollongong has a sobering message for young women who binge drink. The data is in - the more a young woman binge drinks on a night out, the more likely she is to be sexually assaulted, receive unwanted sexual attention and have unprotected sex. via Party culture and the hangover [...]

Ministers and industry watering down pregnancy alcohol warning labels

Inaction, confusion and lack of direction has led to doubts about the federal government's commitment to introduce mandatory pregnancy health warnings for all alcohol by December next year. The alcohol industry has written to the Australian and New Zealand ministers responsible for food and beverage regulation outlining action they have taken to introduce pregnancy warning [...]

Lynx, Unilever continue use of sexualised messages

Melinda Tankard Reist said the advertisement ''hit the jackpot: it's sexist, racist and ageist''. Ms Tankard Reist said she was aware it was designed to provoke outrage. ''We're not stupid,'' she told The Sun-Herald.''We understand what their tactics are but the option of silence is unacceptable.'' via Outrage as Lynx aims below the belt again.

Too many soft drinks ruining our children’s sleep

ONE in five Australian prep students is getting a daily caffeine hit from consuming soft drinks after school, a shock new study has found. Parents have been called "lazy and neglectful" for giving children as young as five regular doses of caffeine-laden cola drinks, sports drinks and energy drinks. A Murdoch Children's Research Institute study [...]

Prescription drug misuse

Younger people carry little or no stigma about using medications casually to solve their problems. This is further borne out by a 2011 Canadian study that found for people under 25, prescription drugs are the third most popular form of drug use, after alcohol and marijuana. via Plague of dodgy prescriptions puts illicit drugs in [...]

How to age well: Let go of regrets

The poem “Maud Muller” by John Greenleaf Whittier aptly ends with the line, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” What if you had gone for the risky investment that you later found out made someone else rich, or if you had had the guts [...]

The decline of the West

It is easy and natural to think of the woes of the West's main powers as an economic problem. Because that's the way it is presented to us. And it is economic - at least, superficially. But if you take a step back, what we're really living through is the decline of the West.It's not [...]

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