Check serving size before downing the whole thing

Get your daily dose of off-the-wall health news at reporter Heather Lalley’s blog. Here are excerpts from two recent posts:

Really? The whole box?

A study reported by the Associated Press reminds us to always check the serving sizes on nutrition labels. And to actually pay attention to them.

The study found that people routinely miscalculate how many calories and how much fat they’re taking in when they have things like soda, bagels, frozen dinners, peanut butter, cookies or candy.

But the story’s anecdotal lead is what caught my attention. It tells of a woman who thought that since her spaghetti noodles were just 170 calories, she could eat as much as she wanted.

She didn’t realize the box held eight servings, a full pound of pasta.

“I can eat the entire box, like that,” she said, snapping her fingers.

I love pasta. And I’m sure I can comfortably eat more than my allotted serving size. But the whole box? Wow. That’s a whole lotta spaghetti.

That aside, it’s a little hard to believe she thought a whole box of noodles had only 170 calories.

I’m just going to keep telling myself that an entire cheesecake has only 50 calories.

More room to put those babies

Taller than average? You may be more likely to give birth to twins (if you’re a woman, of course).

So says a study from the Journal of Reproductive Medicine reported by Reuters recently.

Women who gave birth to twins or triplets were more than an inch taller than average.

Taller women, the study says, release an insulin-like growth factor protein that stimulates the ovaries.

Hard not to check out this headline:

“Egg Eye Injuries Send Docs Scrambling,” which was posted recently on Webmd.com

Apparently, if you throw an egg at someone’s eye, it can hurt them, and cause serious eye injury, the report says.

If only my mom had warned me.

How hard is it to eat an apple?

Unless you’re planning on feeding it to a baby, this new product seems kind of ridiculous.

It’s from e4b – “eat 4 busy” people (get it?) – and it’s fruit puree in a tube that you can just squeeze right into your mouth, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported recently.

If shoving an actual banana into your mouth is just too time-consuming, you’ve got some real issues.

Won’t be long before we’re all popping dinner pills a la “The Jetsons.”