The Best Way To Remove Pesticides From Produce.

Even the less-than-cautious among us still probably give their fruit and vegetables a quick rinse under the tap before eating them. That's in an effort not only to wash off dirt and debris, but also to remove any pesticides. You might go even further by using a vegetable brush or a store-bought veggie wash. How effective is all of that, really? More importantly, how worried should you be about pesticides in the first place?

Scrub a Dub Dub.

Lucky for you, science has tackled this problem before. Here's how effective the most popular produce-washing methods really are:

• Plain water: A 2008 review published in the journal Food Research International found that tap water only reduced the residue of five different pesticides by 20 percent, at most — but at least it's something. Distilled or filtered water may be more effective, and a good several-minute soak can go even further, especially for cutting down on bacteria.
• Soap: Soap isn't meant for washing food, and it's not clear how effective it is against pesticides. It could also possibly seep into the produce, making you ingest another non-food chemical on top of the ones you were trying to wash away. We don't recommend it.

Commercial veggie washes: A study in 2000 by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station found that washing certain fruits and vegetables with a commercial veggie wash was no more effective than rinsing them under tap water for a minute when it came to getting rid of pesticides. Researchers at the University of Maine got the same result for reducing bacteria. The verdict: don't waste your money.
• Vinegar: The Food Research review found that washing tomatoes in a vinegar solution significantly reduced the residues of six different pesticides, some by as much as 94 percent. And in 2007, a Cook's Illustrated test found that vinegar reduced 98 percent of the bacteria on apples and pears. Cheap, nontoxic — what's not to like? Try filling a spray bottle with one part vinegar to three parts water and keep it next to the sink.
• Baking soda: In October 2017, researchers from the University of Massachusetts published a study in the journal Agricultural and Food Chemistry that said soaking apples in a baking soda and water solution for 12–15 minutes can remove almost every trace of pesticides from the fruit's surface. If you have the time, this one's a winner for sure.

It should be mentioned that none of these fixes can remove pesticides that have already seeped into the fruits and vegetables. If you're really worried (which you probably shouldn't be), general preparation methods like peeling, cooking, and canning can remove a substantial amount of pesticides throughout the produce. Peeling goes further than washing by removing the layer that the pesticides have reached; cooking and canning works because many pesticides degrade in heat.

A Few Caveats.

Why not just buy organic? you might ask. Contrary to popular belief, organic produce is grown with pesticides, too. The pesticides just can't be synthetic (and as we've mentioned before, whether a chemical is synthesized from scratch or just perfected from a natural source doesn't say anything about its safety).

In 2011, researchers at UC Davis found that the organic versions of the so-called "dirty dozen" list of fruits and vegetables that pose the highest pesticide risk aren't any safer. They also say that pesticides on those fruits and vegetables were way, way below the acceptable limit set by the EPA, and that the list "lacks scientific credibility" to boot.

But if you're still concerned, take a few precautions. Keep a spray bottle of diluted vinegar on hand for quick rinses and baking soda for when you have the time. Peel or cook the fruits and veggies you're most worried about. But don't stop eating them. The science is in on that front, and it says that you should eat your fruits and veggies if you want to live a healthy life.

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Your Brain Makes Your Extra Antisocial When You're Sick

Being sick gives you an amazing excuse to cozy up on the couch and burn through four seasons of "RuPaul's Drag Race" in a single sitting. No shame. Your preference for shutting out the rest of the world while you're under the weather isn't just your imagination, either. When you're feeling sick and antisocial, blame your brain.

Leave me alone.

It's hard to get out of the house when you're sick, but that's not just because you're not feeling strong enough to put pants on. You're getting subconscious signals from your brain to ignore people at all costs. Because your immune system is connected to your brain, it may, in fact, influence your social behavior.

The vagus nerve is the connector; it's a network of fibers that  parts of your body like your gut and lymph nodes. This nerve can detect cytokines, which are compounds your immune system shoots out when you're battling an illness. Your brain gets word of the illness through the  nerve, and before you know it, you're glued to the couch.

Researchers speculate there are two main reasons your brain puts this homely spell on you. It's an evolutionary adaptation to keep you and the people around you healthy. If you stay inside when you're sick, you're much less likely to spread your illness around to other people. That wouldn't be beneficial for the survival of our species, right? Holing up at home also gives your body the time to fight the infection and bounce back.

Flip It And Reverse It.

Before you go blaming your immune system on your antisocial-ness, it can work in the total opposite way, too. If your health is firing on all cylinders, your brain may nudge you toward being extra extroverted. In a 2010 study, participants were given a flu shot. In the 48 hours following receiving the flu shot, participants "interacted with significantly more people, and in significantly larger groups."

Defend Your Brain With Yoga

Its origins may trace back over 5,000 years, when it was first referenced in sacred texts in Northern India. Today, yoga is one of the most popular forms of exercises around the world. Whether you prefer Ashtanga, Bikram, Kundalini, or another style, new research reveals another reason to make yoga part of your routine for life: its power to protect the brain against the cognitive decline of old age.

A Health Craze With a History.

Yoga had been practiced in the East for centuries before making its way west in the mid-1800s. Some evidence suggests Henry David Thoreau was likely the first American to practice. By the end of the century, yoga masters such as Swami Vivekananda began traveling to raise funds for their communities and share their culture and religion with the world.

It took a little while to catch on, but by the mid-twentieth century, yoga had become popular among Westerners for many benefits. Yoga has been associated with physical benefits like improved flexibility, metabolism, and muscle strength as well as mental health benefits like stress reduction and better focus. Beyond individual practice, yoga is also seen as a boon to public health, as it can be adapted for any age or ability level and can build a sense of community.

More Than Your Average Mind-body connection.

While much is known about the positive impacts yoga can have on health, there is still much to be learned about exactly how it works on a physiological level. Among the latest discoveries, a team of scientists in Brazil recently studied 21 elderly female yoga enthusiasts, who averaged 14.9 years of experience. They found the women to have have greater cortical thickness in the parts of the brains associated with cognitive functions such as attention and memory than a group of 21 of their non-yoga practicing peers.

Their research, published in the Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, suggests that practicing yoga could help ward off the decline of cognitive abilities as we get older. All exercise is arguably good for health, but according to the researchers, yoga's unique combination of physical and mental practices, including meditation appears to have greater benefits than other types of activity. While more further research needs to be done to know the full story of how yoga impacts the brain, the study provides new merit to incorporating yoga practice into any stage of life.

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Different Types Of Meditation Do Different Things To Your Brain.

When you think about meditation, you probably imagine someone splayed cross-legged with their eyes closed, perhaps while chanting. If you've tried your hand at meditation, you might even think about sitting quietly while focusing on your breath and the way your body feels. But just like there are many ways to exercise, there are many ways to meditate. And just like different exercises target different body parts, every technique targets something different in your brain.

Train Your Brain.

In 2017, two studies from the ReSource Project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany were published in Science Advances. For the studies, researchers trained 300 volunteers in three meditation techniques. Then, they analyzed the effects of each technique as the volunteers practiced them regularly for three months apiece, one three-month period after the other.

Here's a rundown of how each technique works, and what it did to the volunteers' brains.

Mindfulness Meditation.

For this technique, which the researchers called "presence" meditation, people focused their attention simply on how it felt to breathe, gently guiding their focus back whenever it wandered. They also performed a "body scan" exercise, where they focused on the sensation and presence of each part of the body, one after the other, from the tips of the toes to the top of the head. They used these same mindfulness techniques in various other activities, such as focusing on how it felt to walk or zeroing in on sights, smells, and tastes.

One of the studies used MRI to assess the differences in brain structures after the training. Mindfulness meditation was associated with a thicker prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe, both of which are linked to attention control.

Compassion Meditation.

The researchers called this technique "loving-kindness" meditation. Compassion meditation is all about connecting with the feeling of love and care for something or someone else. In each session, volunteers began by imagining themselves and then a "benefactor" — someone who does them good, like a parent or a romantic partner — and extend feelings of love, kindness, and good wishes to both themselves and that benefactor.

Over the next several sessions, they extended those feelings to someone they felt neutral about, then to someone they had "difficulties" with, and finally to all beings on Earth. "To stabilize and foster experiences of loving-kindness," the researchers wrote, "we instructed participants to mentally repeat phrases such as 'May you be happy,' 'May you be healthy,' 'May you be safe,' and 'May you live with ease.'" They also focused on accepting their emotions and practicing forgiveness and self-compassion.

This portion also included a partner exercise. In the exercise, one person would tell the other person about something they experienced that day that was either difficult or made them feel grateful. The storyteller focused on how they felt at the time without interpreting the situation, and the listener listened attentively without giving any feedback. Then the roles were reversed.

After it was all over, the volunteers' brains showed increases in the limbic system, which processes emotions. They also had a boost to their anterior insula, which helps you consciously identify your emotions.

Perspective Taking- Training.

In the "perspective module," volunteers performed a solo exercise designed to help them observe their own thoughts as mental events instead of representations of reality. In the first phase, they trained to give their thoughts labels like "me" or "other," "past" or "future," or "positive" or "negative." As they became more experienced, they eventually just observed the comings and goings of thoughts without involving themselves in them.

The perspective module also had a partner exercise. First, all of these volunteers learned about the Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach, which divides the mind into subpersonalities or "inner parts," — for example, "managers" are parts that try to keep you in control of every situation, "exiles" are parts that try to protect you from pain, and "firefighters" are parts that react when exiles are activated in order to extinguish bad feelings.

After that, the partner exercise was a lot like the one used for compassion except that the stories were told from the perspective of one of these "inner parts" without telling the listener which one — the listener had to figure it out from the story. That helped the storyteller take a bird's-eye view of their own experiences, and the listener to infer the perspective of the storyteller.

This perspective-taking training was associated with thickening in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the left occipital region, and the middle temporal gyrus — all of which are linked to Theory of Mind, the ability to understand that others have beliefs, intentions, and perspectives that are different from yours and to infer what they might be.

Different Exercise For Different Strength.

Lead researcher Tania Singer laments the fact that people put all of these cognitive exercises into a big bucket labeled "meditation." "It's like asking a sport expert 'what does sport do to your body'. The expert would say, do you mean swimming or horse-riding? You can imagine mental training being as complex," she told New Scientist. So if you're considering starting a meditation regimen, don't just try any old technique. Think about what you want to accomplish, then find a meditation method designed to build those skills.

 That all for today friends . Have any quary ask in the comments.

5 Persuasion Tricks To Get People To Do What You Want.

We all want something, and a lot of times, it involves getting someone's help. Considering how much time we spend trying to persuade or convince others, it's surprising we don't stop more often to think about whether we're using the right methods. So why waste time trying new tactics when we can go straight to science? We've put together some tricks to help you get your way.

1. Explain The Reason For Your Request.

Think about a time you were in a huge hurry and you had to wait in line for something important. You might not have gotten too far if you simply asked, "Can I cut in line?" The likelihood of persuading someone to agree with your request would have increased by more than 50 percent if you had added one thing: a reason. "Can I cut in line because I need to catch my flight?" or even, "Can I cut in line because I'm in a rush?" The greater request, the greater the reason you should provide to truly increase your chances of getting what you want, but a little rationalizing can go a long way.

2. Listen First Then ask For The Favour.

Lynne Franklin is a consultant to executives and teams on persuasive communication, and she discussed the psychology of persuasion"It's called the rule of reciprocity," she told us. "Say something interesting and get them to speak. You learn more about who they are or what they do, They're more interested in reciprocating. I've listened first, now they want to ask me about me. So I've built good will without having said anything.".

This works well with people we've never met, but it's worth remembering that you can talk to someone you already know in order to achieve the same effect. "We as human beings have a tendency to decide what we want people to do and then tell them. And they don't care. They have their own agenda," Franklin explained.

"So how can you present your idea in a way that increases the chances that they'll actually want to do it? And in order to do that, you need to know who they are and what motivates them." You need to understand what they want and find a way to give them that by achieving what you want.

3. Give an actual gift in return for a person help.

Similar to exchanging information, the norm of reciprocity is a social convention that compels people to return a favor when someone has helped them. Charities use this principle when providing unconditional gifts like return address labels or even a pen or pencil, and it can increase donations by up to 75 percent. Just be careful when using this approach: providing external incentives can actually decrease giving in certain situations, particularly when it comes to charity.

4. Switch up the words you are using.

There are a lot of quick and dirty language tricks that, though subtle, can make a big difference when you're trying to persuade someone to do what you want. For instance, try saying "I" instead of "you" to remove the accusatory element of your statements, e.g. "You need to go to the grocery store," versus, "I feel stressed because I have to go to the grocery store."

If you're worried your request will be met with a hard "no," you can also try the magic words "but you are free [to refuse]" to double (!) your chances of getting what you want. And if you're the one saying "no" and you want people to accept your refusal, then say you "don't" do something instead of saying you "can't." This way, the person refusing won't be able to fight you with logic or find a way to turn "can't" into "can." Pay attention to your word choices and you never know what other neat tricks you'll find!

5. Ask in Person.

We all rely on email and other text-based communication these days, but it's never as effective as looking someone in the eye and asking for a favor. And the difference is massive: a pair of experiments conducted by researchers in 2016 concluded that complete strangers receiving a request in person were 34 times more likely to fill out a survey than strangers who were asked over email. If that's not a reason to ditch the keyboard for an IRL conversation, then we don't know what is.

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