High Fat/Bad Brain

In this week's Rundown, an orange ball helps to improve your golf swing, a rower transforms into a cube and a high-fat diet does more than expand your waistline.

The Rundown

Whip It. The Orange Whip Trainer is a warm-up tool for your golf swing. Composed of a weighted orange ball, a counterweight and a flexible shaft, it trains you to feel the rhythm and balance of your swing. The weighted ball replaces the club head so you can focus on swinging naturally, while the counterweight provides balance and stabilization.

Box Rower. Fitness company Kingsmith takes space saving to a new level with the WR1 (see it here on Indiegogo), a water rower that can be folded into thirds to form a wheeled cube. Metrics such as strokes per minute, elapsed time, speed, calories burned and distance rowed are displayed via app. The makers claim that when folded, the rower takes up the same amount of space as a 26 inch suitcase.

High Fat/Bad Brain. Staying away from fatty foods is not just good for your waistline. In an international study (read the abstract), scientists from the University of South Australia and China established a link between mice fed a high-fat diet and a subsequent deterioration in their cognitive abilities, which included developing anxiety, depression and worsening Alzheimer’s disease.

For the study, mice were randomly assigned a standard diet or a high-fat diet for 30 weeks. Food intake, body weight and glucose levels were monitored, along with cognitive dysfunction.

The mice on the high-fat diet gained a lot of weight and developed insulin resistance. Additionally, genetically modified Alzheimer’s disease mice showed substantial deterioration of cognition and pathological changes in the brain while on the high-fat diet.

Study co-author, Larisa Bobrovskaya warns that “a combination of obesity, age and diabetes is very likely to lead to a decline in cognitive abilities, Alzheimer’s disease and other mental health disorders.”

Replay

This week’s vintage moment in fitness culture is brought to you by Jack LaLanne who famously quipped, “I can’t die. It would ruin my image.” Photo courtesy of Elaine LaLanne.