A completely stress-free life seems like a much better alternative. But it isn’t necessarily a good thing, research is now showing. A small amount of stress may actually help kids build mental toughness. David Lyons is a behavioral neuroscientist at Stanford University in California. His team reported causal evidence for this connection in a November 2019 paper Scientific Reports.

The team studied young monkeys. These monkeys experienced varying degrees of stress. "No-stress" monkeys enjoyed a typical life in the lab. They were housed in a cage with their mother and siblings. There was plenty of water and food. They also got toys. The second group faced a mild stressor. They spent an hour a day away from their siblings on 10 straight days. The stress level went up for the third group. These monkeys had daily separation from siblings and no access to mothers during that hour. Two more groups experienced daily separation from both their mothers and siblings.

A fortnight later, all the monkeys were moved with their mothers to some unfamiliar cages. The researchers examined the monkeys’ willingness to leave their mothers and explore the new surroundings. The team also analyzed levels of the stress cortisol in the animals’ blood. That blood had been collected before, during and after their time in the new cage.

Generally, monkeys faced with one or two stressors(groups 2 and 3) depend less on their mothers than those in groups 4 and 5. They were also more willing to explore the new environment. On the whole, they behaved less anxiously than both the no-stress and high-stress groups. The monkeys’ cortisol patterns also reflected this trend. Animals that were exposed to mild stress lowered their cortisol level faster than the other monkeys.

Growing up healthy means "learning how to deal with mild challenges and changes," Lyons concludes.

Sugar-free cookies, reduced-sugar cereal, sugar- free candy, diet soda...are these better for you? After sugar became a taboo(禁忌) in the nutrition and wellness world, sugar-free food items and beverages acted as substitutes for once beloved sweet drinks and snacks. Claiming to be ZERO sugar meant it was healthier, better for diabetics, and helped you slim down...Right?

Wrong. Sugar-free food isn’t better for you. In fact, it is worse.

Sugar-free means that artificial sweeteners (甜味剂) are used instead of real sugar. The problem: these sweeteners do not come from natural sources and they can cause you more harm than good.

Let’s get into what these artificial sweeteners actually are. Sugar-free sugar sounds wrong and that’s because there is no such thing as sugar-free sugar. Some of these sugar-free alternatives even contain sugar and the ones that don’t have chemicals your body often does not know how to process.

Most artificial sweeteners are a lot sweeter than sugar so only a tiny amount is needed. That’s why they can market sugar-free alternatives as “low-calorie” or “no-calorie”. It also means that you get no nutritional value from consuming them, which is why many sugar-free substitutes are classified as “non-nutritive”. These artificial sweeteners tend to hide under sneaky names. Actually, they are 200-600 times sweeter than sugar.

When you eat sweet stuff, your body continues to desire it and, even though your body cannot metabolize(新陈代谢) these sugar-free alternatives, your brain does not know the difference. In turn, sugar-free alternatives connect to weight gain and type 2 diabetes (糖尿病).

Artificial sweeteners also damage your gut’s ability to break down sugar which impacts everything you eat. In other words, your body doesn’t know how to handle artificial sweeteners because they have nothing real to process.

A good rule of thumb: stay away from artificial sweeteners and look for non-sugar, natural sweeteners like Stevia or date sugar. In the war against artificial sweeteners and real sugar, both lose. Satisfy your sweet tooth with natural sugars that come from fruits and stay away from products claiming to be sugar-free or diet!

There was a time when we thought humans were special in so many ways. Now we know better. We are not the only species that feels emotions, or follows a moral code. Neither are we the only ones with personalities, cultures and the ability to design and use tools. Yet we have all agree that one thing, at least, makes us unique: we alone have the ability of language.

It turns out that we are not so special in this aspect either. Key to the revolutionary reassessment of our talent for communication is the way we think about language itself. Where once it was seen as an unusual object, today scientists find it is more productive to think of language as a group of abilities. Viewed this way, it becomes apparent that the component parts of language are not as unique as the whole.

Take gesture, arguably the starting point for language. Until recently, it was considered uniquely human - but not any more. Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and others have collected a list of gestures observed in monkeys and some other animals, which reveals that gestures plays a large role in their communication. Ape(猿) gestures can involve touch, vocalising or eye movement, and individuals wait until they have another ape’s attention before making visual or auditory gestures. If their gestures go unacknowledged, they will often repeat them.

In an experiment carried out in 2006 by Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne from the University of St Andrews in the UK, they got a person to sit on a chair with some highly desirable food such as banana to one side of apes and some undesirable food such as vegetables to the other. The apes, who could see the person and the food from their enclosures, gestured at their human partners to encourage them to push the desirable food their way. If the person showed incomprehension and offered the vegetables, the animals would change their gestures - just as a human would in a similar situation. If the human seemed to understand while being somewhat confused, giving only half the preferred food, the apes would repeat and exaggerate their gestures - again in exactly the same way a human would. Such findings highlight the fact that the gestures of the animals are not merely inborn but are learned, flexible and under voluntary control - all characteristics that are considered preconditions for human-like communication.