Ed Currie, founder of the Puckerbutt Pepper Company in Fort Mill, South Carolina, hopes his homegrown “Carolina Reaper” — a crossbreed of a Sweet Habanero and a Naga Viper — will soon own the Guinness world record for the hottest chili pepper, but even if it doesn’t, he won’t feel his work has been in vain. That’s because he credits his pepper hobby-turned-profession with keeping him cancer-free.
The 49-year-old Currie, who has a family history of early death from heart disease and cancer, has had seven tumors removed from his body during his lifetime. Concerned for his health, he began researching indigenous people from around the world who eat hot peppers frequently and found they have very low occurrences of cancer and heart problems. Out of that research, his company was born, and in the five years since he began eating his hot peppers on a daily basis, he has remained cancer-free. Coincidence?
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It’s doubtful that whoever came up with the phrase “too much of a good thing” was thinking about soy sauce, but apparently you can indeed have too much of that delicious soybean-based condiment. As proof: an article published in The Journal of Emergency Medicine reported that an unnamed 19-year-old Virginia man slipped into a coma after drinking a quart of soy sauce on a bet.
After drinking more than one-third of a pound of the sauce, the man began having seizures and was rushed to the emergency room. He was given anti-seizure medication but within four hours of ingesting the liquid, he went into a coma and was admitted to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, Virginia for “intentional massive sodium chloride ingestion” — basically, ingesting too much salt. He experienced a condition called hypernatremia, or an excess of salt in the blood, which causes water to seep out of body tissues into the bloodstream to dilute the excess salt. The problem with this is that when water leaves the brain, it can shrivel up and bleed, causing the patient to slip into a coma.
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In this online world we live in, there’s a wealth on information available on the Web that can prove beneficial to medical assistants. It doesn’t matter if you’re a student still studying to become a medical assistant, a recent graduate looking for a medical assisting job or a working medical assistant who needs a little refresher course on performing your duties, you can find help online. Here is a list of some of the websites that medical assistants might find useful.
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Ever since it began running its commercials about Jared Fogle’s weight loss in 2000, the Subway restaurant franchise has gained a reputation of being a healthy alternative to typical fast food fare. But is that perception warranted? Sure, perhaps on some level, but probably not to the extent that you assume.
A recent study put those assumptions to the test — not only for Subway, but also McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin’ Donuts. Published in the journal BMJ, the study polled customers at these restaurants in the New England area — 1,877 adults, 330 school-aged children and 1,178 adolescents — asking them to estimate the calories in the meals they bought.
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Popular thought has it that smoking marijuana gives you “the munchies,” making smokers eat more than non-smokers — in excess of 600 calories more, according to a 2006 study — but if that’s true, why aren’t potheads noticeably fatter than the rest of the population? As it turns out, that’s exactly what a group of researchers from the University of Nebraska and Harvard wondered, and they just may have found the answer…at least partially.
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