Thursday, February 21, 2013

Going to live forever...

Haven't posted one of these in a while.
The National Institutes of Health study, published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicated that caffeinated and decaf coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections.
In an interview published this week in the Journal of Caffeine Research, Neal Freedman — with the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the NIH National Cancer Institute — said his study is among the most comprehensive to date of the health benefits of coffee and has significant implications for java junkies. Researchers tracked 500,000 U.S. men and women — ages 50 to 71, all members of the American Association of Retired Persons — for about 12 years. 
Not only did the results show a clear association between coffee and longevity, Freedman said, but they also indicated people who drank the most coffee tended to have greatest health benefits. 

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Freedom of complex associations

The Tennessee legislature is renewing its attempt to override Vanderbilt's freedom of association in the name of the freedom of association of religious student clubs.  Disappointingly, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education seems to have forgotten its traditional commitment to universities' own freedom of association, and seems to endorse the selective withholding of state benefits (so selective as to creep into bill of attainder territory!) in order to force Vanderbilt to change its policy... a policy of withholding benefits from student clubs that don't admit all comers, in order to get them to change their policies.