If there were an Oscar category for best performance by a food and beverage in a movie, it would have to include even more nominees than this year’s best-picture category.

But you could bet all your Oscar pool money that the winning product would be one that’s high in sugar, salt and fat and low in vitamins, minerals and fiber.

In a study published online Monday in the medical journal Pediatrics, a team of researchers from Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire found that 69 percent of the 200 popular movies they studied (the top 20 box-office hits for each year in the decade 1996-2005) featured at least one food, beverage and/or food retail establishment. (The average number of brand placements in those movies was nine.)

And — surprise! surprise! — the brands that showed up most frequently among the 1,180 identified were sugar-sweetened beverages, salty snacks and candy. As for the food retail establishments featured, two-thirds were fast-food restaurants. (McDonald’s and Burger King led the pack.)

Under the radar
What really did surprise me about this study was that it’s apparently the first time that researchers have taken a comprehensive look at food and beverage product placement in popular movies. We’ve long known about how calorie-dense, nutrient-poor products are advertised during children’s TV programming — and how such advertising detrimentally affects kids’ food choices and eating habits.

Yet, meanwhile, under the radar, food manufacturers have been stealthily placing their foods and other products with nil nutritional value on the big screen.

You’d think someone would have started looking at this issue long before now. After all, it’s been almost 30 years since the release of the movie "E.T.," which famously featured Reese’s Pieces.

As the study’s authors noted, “In the 3 months immediately after the film’s release, brand sales of Reese’s Pieces increased 65%. This demonstrated the potential power of product placement in the movies as a marketing tool.”

That potential was certainly not lost on manufacturers of sugary-salty-fatty foods. Those companies must have found the big screen particularly attractive as a means of reaching kids as they came under increasing fire for hawking their junk food to children on TV.

“Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have long-standing commitments not to advertise their soft drink products during children’s television programming,” the study’s authors noted, “yet sugar-sweetened beverage products from these companies regularly appeared in movies, especially those rated for children and adolescents.”

Indeed, sugar-sweetened beverages made up the largest proportion (25 percent) of all the brands that appeared in the movies studied, whereas other research has shown that they make up only 5.6 percent and 12.3 percent of the ads that appear on children’s and adolescent TV programming, respectively.

More details
Here are a few other interesting findings from the study:

• Brand placements were more likely to occur in PG-13 and R-rated movies rather than in G and PG movies. But one-third of G-rated movies and more than half (58.5 percent) of PG-rated movies had brand appearances.

• Comedies, drama and horror films had more brand placements than family animations and science fiction/fantasy films. Comedies tended to have the most placements from all three categories studied (food, beverage, and food establishment).

• Movies that grossed less than $200 million had more brand placements than those that grossed more than that amount.

• Six companies (PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, McDonald’s, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, and Burger King) accounted for 45 percent of all brand placements.

Why it matters
This study raises troubling questions because of the growing obesity problem in U.S. children and adolescents and because of other research that has demonstrated the considerable impact movies can have on children’s behavior.

As the authors of this study point out, the existing voluntary pledge from leading food companies to “shift the mix of advertising messaging directed at children to encourage healthier dietary choices and lifestyle choices” is a step in the right direction, but doesn’t go far enough.

“Movies provide an avenue through which companies are marketing foods of low nutritional value to consumers, including children and adolescents, who may not even be aware of the advertising,” the authors concluded.

NB: The website brandchannel.com keeps track of brand placements in many popular films, and issues tongue-in-cheek (I think) “brandcameo” Product Placement Awards each year. You can go there to find out how many brands have made cameo appearances in recent films. Although some 2009 films (“A Christmas Carol” and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”) didn’t have any brand placements, most apparently did. Here, for example, is the stunningly long list of brands that appear in the PG-rated 2009 movie “Mall Cop":

Aéropostale, ALDO, Au Bon Pain, Bath and Body Works, Bose, Brookstone, Budweiser, Caché, Champs Sports, Coca-Cola, Crabtree & Evelyn, Dasani, Dunkin' Donuts, EA Sports, F.Y.E., Fender, Ford, Ford Mustang, Hello Kitty, Kay Jewelers, Lacoste, L'Occitane, Lord & Taylor, Macy's, McDonald's, Motorola, Mystic Tan, New Jersey Devils, Orange Julius, Perfectmatch.com, Pixy Stix, Rainforest Cafe, Rock Band, Segway, Sephora, Snickers, Sony, Sony PlayStation, Sony VAIO, Sunglass Hut, Talbots, The Limited, The Sharper Image, The Sims, Uno, Verizon, Victoria's Secret, Williams-Sonoma, Zales.

Feel free to nominate your "favorite" 2009 brandcameo appearance in the comments section below.

People who drink two or more sugar-sweetened soft drinks per week appear to be almost twice as likely to develop pancreatic cancer as people who consume no soft drinks, according to a University of Minnesota study published today in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

“The increase in blood sugar that happens dramatically after you drink a soft drink stimulates insulin in the pancreas,” said Mark Pereira, Ph.D., senior author on the study and an associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, in a phone interview last week.

The part of the pancreas where tumors are most likely to develop becomes particularly flooded with insulin, he added.

Pancreatic cancer is relatively rare, but very deadly. Of the 42,000 Americans who are diagnosed with this cancer each year, only about 5 percent are alive five years later. Current known modifiable risk factors for pancreatic cancer include smoking, obesity, type 2 diabetes and exposure to certain pesticides and other chemicals. Diet may also play a role, particularly diets that include a lot of red and processed meats.

For the study, Pereira and his colleagues followed 60,524 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study for 14 years.

During that time, 140 of the study’s participants developed pancreatic cancer. After adjusting for such potential confounding factors as cigarette smoking, obesity and diabetes, Pereira and his colleagues found that drinking two or more soft drinks increased the risk of pancreatic cancer by 87 percent.

“The average intake in those who consumed two-plus soft drinks a week was actually five a week, so a lot of them were consuming it every day,” Pereira said.

Why go to Singapore to do this study? Previous studies have found a similar correlation between soft drinks and pancreatic cancer in Caucasian populations, said Pereira. If the correlation is real, it should be found in different settings and among different groups of people, he said.

Interestingly, the study found no correlation between the consumption of fruit juice and pancreatic cancer. Pereira offered several possible explanations for why the sugar in fruit juice wouldn’t have the same effect as that in soft drinks: People who drink fruit juice regularly may have a healthier overall lifestyle. In addition, the nutrients in fruit juices, particularly antioxidants, may act as protective factors.

Furthermore, said Pereira, it’s possible that other additives in soft drinks are converted in the body to carcinogens.

Pereira stressed that his study has several limitations. “This is observational research, so we don’t draw strong conclusions” about cause-and-effect, he said. 

In addition, participants self-reported their eating habits, a form of data collecting that can be unreliable. Also, although Pereira considered confounding factors when crunching his numbers, other unknown dietary or behavioral factors that weren’t controlled for (such as red meat consumption) may have influenced the findings.

Pereira hopes to do a meta-analysis next — a study that pools together data from many different studies to address some of the possible biases in this one.

Here is a video interview with Pereira.

Although the findings of the U of M study can’t be considered definitive in terms of pancreatic cancer, soft drinks — including sugarless diet ones — contain nothing of nutritional value and have been linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease, as well as dental decay. Just last fall, some of our leading nutrition experts argued in the New England Journal of Medicine for an increased tax on soft drinks as a public health measure.

“Our study is just another reason to really limit your consumption of soft drinks,” said Pereira.

Forbes magazine has put up a must-see slide show of “Ten Misleading Drug Ads.”

These are among the 41 advertising and promotional campaigns that generated warning letters in 2009 from the apparently newly energized U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates such advertising. (Hat tip: Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview blog.)

As Forbes reporter Rebecca Ruiz notes, the FDA issued twice as many enforcement letters in 2009, under President Obama’s administration, than it did the previous year under President George W. Bush’s watch. (I posted on Monday about FDA warning letters sent to pharmaceutical companies last year regarding online ads.)

But that's still way below the 142 that were sent out in 1997, the year, as Ruiz puts it, when the "FDA issued new rules for direct-to-consumer advertising, opening the floodgates for drug companies to advertise on television."

As one source quoted by Forbes said (with considerable understatement), during the Bush administration "FDA leadership made it clear they were not going to be zealous in keeping the industry's feet to the fire on such ads."

We'll have to wait and see exactly how zealous the agency will be under President Obama.

Pharmaceutical chutzpah

The misinformation that appears in some drug ads is quite remarkable. Writes Ruiz:

Each of the 10 ads featured in the Forbes article comes with a brief explanation of the FDA’s concerns — things like not fully reporting a drug’s side effects, or exaggerating its benefits, or suggesting that it be used “off-label” (for a purpose that hasn’t been approved by the FDA). For readers who want more details, the article also includes links to the actual warning letters that the agency sent to manufacturer of the drug or medical device.

Here’s a list of the products in the ads featured by Forbes:

• Latisse (a prescription eyelash thickening agent)
• Cymbalta (a prescription drug used to treat fibromyalgia and depression)
• Kaletra (an AIDS drug)
• Mirena (a hormone-releasing intrauterine device)
• Treximet (a drug used for migraine relief)
• Depakote ER (a drug used for treating bi-polar disorder)
• Ertaczo (a drug used for treating the fungus that causes athlete’s foot)
• Fosrenol (a drug used for treating kidney failure)
• Visipaque (a drug used in heart imaging procedures)
• Dacogen (a drug used to treat rare blood-cell disorders and blood cancers)

Like Gary Schwitzer, I, too, wish Forbes hadn't decided to stop at 10.

On Tuesday, the British medical journal The Lancet took a remarkable action.

It finally retracted a discredited 1998 study that had linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism and bowel disorders.

The retraction came a week after the U.K.’s General Medical Council issued a scathing ruling that charged the study’s lead author, British surgeon and medical research Andrew Wakefield, with unethical behavior, including “callous disregard” for the children used in the study.

Here are just a few of the details of Wakefield’s “dishonest,” “misleading,” and “irresponsible” actions, as described in the council’s 143-page report:

• Wakefield took blood from his son’s friends at a birthday party (paying them each the equivalent of $8) and then joked about it at a medical meeting several months later.

• He ordered some children who did not meet the inclusion criteria (gastrointestinal symptoms) for his research to undergo unnecessary colonoscopies, spinal taps, brains scans and other tests.

• He failed to declare serious financial conflicts of interests. Before he even began his research, Wakefield was hired by a lawyer to “produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous” (according to a confidential letter written by that lawyer). In addition, just months before the study appeared in The Lancet, Wakefield had filed a patent for a different, “safer” vaccine that would have been in direct competition with the MMR vaccine.

(For the truly devastating details of this case, see the summary of reporter Brian Deer’s series of investigative articles that ran in Britain’s Sunday Times.)

Wakefield will most likely be banned soon from practicing medicine.

But it isn’t just his methods that have been discredited. So have his findings: the link with autism. In fact, 10 of his co-authors submitted a retraction of the study in 2004, and numerous studies published since then have found no link between autism and the MMR vaccine.

The 1998 study, by the way, involved only a dozen children — many of whom were part of the lawsuit filed by the lawyer that hired Wakefield.

Yet, the damage has already been done. Doubt about the safety of vaccines has been implanted in the minds of some parents — doubt that has festered into a full-blown anti-vaccine movement. None of the damning evidence presented during the 148 days of hearings seems to have persuaded Wakefield’s fervent followers that his science was deeply flawed.

Indeed, spectators heckled the council’s chairperson as she read aloud the report’s key findings last week.

Trust will take years to regain
I spoke on Wednesday with Patsy Stinchfield, a nurse practitioner and director of infectious disease and immunology at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.

A passionate advocate for childhood immunizations, she was relieved by the council’s ruling.

“I think it’s a wonderful decision,” she said. “I hope that we can mark that day as a turning point in the vaccine safety conversation.”

But despite the “enormous amount of science” showing no connection between vaccines and autism, some people will continue to deny the evidence, Stinchfield said. That denial is why health officials must keep up their efforts to educate the public about vaccine safety, she added.

“It’s going to take us years, if not decades, to turn around the thinking that was based on this paper and on what was pretty poor science,” she said.

The impact of Wakefield’s flawed study has been felt around the world — and often with tragic results.

“Before that paper was published in the U.K.,” said Stinchfield, “they had maybe 50 or 60 cases of measles each year.” After the paper came out — and parents stopped immunizing their children — the annual cases of measles rose as high as 1,500. “They’ve had some deaths there as well,” she said.

Most parents don’t realize that measles can be a very serious illness, Stinchfield pointed out. “It’s not just a rash,” she said. “It can cause pneumonia and encephalitis, as well as brain damage in children who survive.”

According to the latest statistics from the Minnesota Department of Health, Minnesota had only 18 isolated cases of measles during the 11 years from 1997 to 2007. But the threat of an outbreak remains.

Stinchfield vividly remembers Minnesota's last major measles outbreak, which occurred in 1990. “We had 440 cases in the state,” she said. “A lot of them were young children. Our hospital was just overflowing with measles cases.”

Three children died from measles-related complications that year — the first deaths from the disease in Minnesota in more than 10 years.

After that, the state laid down the law regarding childhood vaccinations — literally — with a “no jab, no school” piece of legislation. Parents can, however, opt out for religious or philosophical reasons. It’s that loophole — coupled with the misinformation that’s feeding the growing anti-vaccine movement — that has many health providers concerned.

It used to be that less than 1 percent of all Minnesota parents submitted a notarized consciousness objection to exclude their child from immunizations. “But that number has slowly increased,” said Stinchfield. “The last I heard, it was about 3 percent.”

Even parents who’ve had their child immunized need to worry about that number. The measles vaccine is only about 95 percent effective, so some children who’ve been vaccinated may catch the highly contagious disease from an unvaccinated classmate or other child with the illness. And, of course, a child who has not yet reached the age to receive the vaccination is also at risk.

Stinchfield remains puzzled and frustrated by parents who continue to deny the scientific evidence that vaccines save lives.

“Before we had a measles vaccine, we had 4 million cases of the disease each year in the U.S. — and 3,000 deaths,” she said. “Now for us to have any cases of the measles is extremely rare, and a death would be headline news. We don’t want to go back to that.”

I'm someone who eats at least one salad daily, sometimes with prewashed packaged organic lettuce, so the findings from Consumer Reports’ latest tests on packaged leafy greens were not what I wanted to hear.

The magazine tested 208 samples of packaged salad greens (representing 16 brands) and discovered that a significant percentage contained unacceptable levels of two types of bacteria: total coliforms and enterococcus.

Those bacteria, which are found in the human digestive system, are considered “indicator organisms,” which means they’re used to determine if water, food, or something else has become contaminated with disease-causing fecal matter.

In other words, their presence is a sign of poor sanitation.

Specifically, Consumer Reports’ tests found that 39 percent of the sample greens exceeded the generally accepted industry standard (10,000 or more colony-forming units per gram) for total coliform and 23 percent exceeded the standard for enterococcus. (There are no federal indicator bacteria standards for salad greens, although such standards do exist for milk, beef and drinking water.)

There’s good news in the report, however. As Consumer Reports notes, indicator bacteria do not usually make healthy people sick. And the tests found no signs of the trio of truly dangerous bacteria: E. coli (0157:H7), listeria or salmonella.

But, then again, they weren’t expecting to find those particular pathogens. Their sample was too small. 

How much should we worry?
To find out just how concerned we should be about a report like this, I spoke with Joellen Feirtag, Ph.D., an associate professor in food science at the University of Minnesota.

Feirtage said she wasn’t at all surprised by Consumer Reports’ findings, as many such studies have been done before, with similar results.

Nor does she believe that people should stop eating packaged lettuce. “You probably aren’t going to get sick from this type of bacteria,” she said.

Yet these findings are another clear sign that we need to develop better systems for making sure food stays uncontaminated.“We need to be asking how we can reduce these indicators at the farm level,” Feirtag said. “If we reduce them, we’ll more likely also reduce or eliminate the pathogens,” such as E. coli, that do make us sick.

Part of the problem, she said, is that much of the produce we eat is grown on large farms in far-away places, such as California or South America.By the time the produce has reached us, it has had many opportunities to be improperly handled — and to permit any bacteria on it to grow.

“Ideally, you want fresher produce that hasn’t been traveling,” Feirtag said. But small, local farms are not always the answer, she added.“We’ve shown that there is no more safety in foods from smaller farms than in those from larger ones,” she said.

Nor is organic produce any safer in terms of bacterial contamination. (Indeed, the bacteria-contaminated national brands in the Consumer Reports study included Earthbound Farm Organic as well as such nonorganic brands as Dole and Fresh Express.)

What you can do
One of the problems with finding bacteria on lettuce, said Feirtag, is that the food is eaten raw, and thus there’s no chance to use heat to destroy the pathogens. “You’re not cooking the lettuce,” she said. “You might be able to rinse some of [the bacteria] off, but not all of it. ”

Still, both Feirtag and Consumer Reports recommend washing the lettuce anyway, even if the package says the greens have been “pre-washed” or “triple-washed.”

Here are some other suggestions.

• Avoid packaged products with spinach. Most of the samples with a high bacterial count in the Consumer Reports study tended to contain spinach.

• Buy packages that are as far away from their use-by date as possible. The longer greens have been out of the soil, the more time bacteria has to grow.

• Rinse your greens as soon as you get them home.  Dry them, and then immediately store them in the refrigerator.

• Keep your greens away from raw meat — including any utensil or cutting board that you use to prepare raw meat.

And, whatever you do, don’t stop eating salads. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported late last year, we’re eating way below the recommended three or more helping of vegetables and two or more helpings of fruit daily.

Nationally, the CDC reports, only 32.8 percent of us get enough fruit daily, and only 27.4 of us get enough vegetables. The numbers are worse for Minnesotans: 27.3 and 25.8, respectively.

And a pitiful 11.6 percent of Minnesotans (compared to 14.0 percent nationally) get enough healthful helpings of both fruits and vegetables daily.

It’s been more than a decade since scientists first published the startling (and, let’s face it, rather depressing) finding that antidepressant medications are no more effective than a placebo at lifting depression in most people.

In the meantime, sales of antidepressants in the United States have doubled, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005. In 2008, American spent $9.6 billion on these drugs.

Are antidepressants “a triumph of marketing over science”? Maybe, suggests science writer Sharon Begley in the cover article of the Feb. 8 issue of Newsweek. In the article, she details why, despite the strong scientific evidence that “the lion’s share of the drugs’ effect comes from the fact that patients expect to be helped by them, and not from any direct chemical action on the brain,” consumers and physicians alike continue to resist the idea that antidepressants are “basically expensive Tic Tacs” for everybody except those with very severe depression.

I’ve emphasized that last phrase because I, like Begley, worry that people for whom these drugs are working will suddenly stop taking them. As Begley points out, tossing out the medications “can cause serious withdrawal symptoms, including twitches, tremors, blurred vision, and nausea — as well as depression and anxiety.”

Still, it’s clear from the growing pile of research, including a study published in January in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that for people with mild to moderate depression (that’s 87 percent of people being treated for the illness), the placebo effect explains most of the drugs’ benefits.

As one of the co-authors of the latest study, a meta-analysis of six previously published placebo-controlled studies, told Begley: “Most people don’t need an active drug. For a lot of folks, you’re going to do as well on a sugar pill or on conversations with your physicians as you will on medication. It doesn’t matter what you do; it’s just the fact that you’re doing something.”

Indeed, psychotherapy has been shown to be more effective — and to have significantly lower relapse rates — than either pills or placebos for treating mild to moderate depression, Begley points out. “But there’s the little matter of reality,” she adds. “In the U.S., most patients with depression are treated by primary-care doctors, not psychiatrists. The latter are in short supply, especially outside cities and especially for children and adolescents. Some insurance plans discourage such care, and some psychiatrists do not accept insurance.”

For these reasons, many experts believe that the current “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about antidepressants should continue. Even a placebo effect is better than no effect for people in emotional pain, they argue.

But a growing number of scientists believe it’s time to end this charade. One of those is Irving Kirsch, the University of Connecticut professor of psychology who co-authored the 1998 landmark study that first raised serious questions about the effectiveness of antidepressants, and who, despite some nasty attempts by antidepressant advocates to marginalize him professionally, has continued his research on this topic. (His book, "The Emperor's New Drugs," was published late last year.) Writes Begley:

With 60 percent of us now searching the Internet for health-related information, you can understand why the marketers of drugs and medical devices are so eager to implant their messages online — particularly in social media sites and blogs.

But how complete are those messages? Are consumers getting the full picture (risks as well as benefits) of these products?

And how comfortable are you with the idea of drug and device companies “talking” directly with you or your physicians through social media sites like Facebook, or of them paying a blogger to write about a product without your knowledge?

Until last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration appeared to permit the pharmaceutical industry to follow a “one click” rule:  A company could promote a product, such as in a search-engine advertisement, as long as the ad linked to complete safety information elsewhere.

But, as Bridget Kuehn reported last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the FDA is no longer happy with that approach — a message it articulated in warning letters sent to more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies last April. Writes Kuehn:

The letters got Big Pharma’s attention. It immediately requested more clarification on what the FDA considered acceptable online advertising, particularly for social media sites.

Of course, the companies (and their lobbyists) had their own ideas for what the FDA should allow.

Last November, the FDA held a hearing on the issue. Most of the people testifying at the hearing, reported Kuehn, were representatives of companies that specialize in online interactive marketing of drugs.

“Many encouraged the FDA to look beyond just online advertising, and to allow companies and their surrogates to interact directly with patients or physicians through online chat rooms or such third-party Web sites as Facebook,” wrote Kuehn.

In addition, a representative for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association argued that the FDA should hold its drug companies responsible only for information they post on their own Web sites.

Consumer advocates, however, told the FDA that such loosening of the rules was a bad idea. In fact, tougher rules were needed — and that companies should be held accountable for any information “they create or cause to be created” on third-party websites. Furthermore, those websites should be required to disclose their financial relationship with the companies.

How will the FDA shape its final rules on this matter? Kuehn did not offer any speculations.

This is not a minor matter, however. As one expert on the effects of advertisements on public health told Kuehn: “Prescription drugs are a different type of consumer commodity. If you purchase the wrong bar of soap, that’s not likely to have any effects on your health, but if you end up with the wrong prescription drug, that very well could have some effects on your health that you would want to know about.”

The only way we can travel through time, of course, is in our mind.

But as we do so — as we contemplate either our past or our future — our body moves ever so imperceptibly with us.

Specifically, we sway slightly backward when we muse about the past and slightly forward when we turn our thoughts to the future.

That’s the curious finding from a new study conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and published earlier this month in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The finding suggests that the invisible process of mental time travel (chronesthesia) elicits an unconscious physical movement — a movement that reflects our metaphor for time (past = back; future = forward).

In other words, our perceptions of time and space may be very closely linked.

Here are the specifics about the study: The scientists fitted 20 young adults with a movement sensor. They then blindfolded the participants and asked them to recall what a typical day was like for them four years earlier or to envision what a day in their life might be like four years in the future. The sensors detected that the participants consistently leaned backward when dwelling mentally in the past and forward when imagining the future.

Are there any other examples of this kind of coupling of thought and subtle physical movement?

Not that he knows of, wrote psychologist Lynden Miles, the study’s lead author, in an email to me earlier this week.

“The closest I know of,” he wrote, “is the link between the experience and expression of emotion — for instance, emotional states (e.g., happiness) can influence our facial expressions (e.g., smiling) and shape the way we move (e.g, walking speed, gait patterns, etc.). While this isn’t a direct coupling of thought to movement, it’s similar to the extent that emotions are essentially invisible until they are overtly manifest, for example, in patterns of movement.”

I also asked Miles if his findings were cultural-specific — in other words, would people in cultures where time isn’t viewed in a straight line show different movements when thinking about the past and the future?

“We don’t know yet,” he answered. “Some research suggests that not all cultures think of the past as being behind them and the future in front of them — for example, speakers of Aymara, an Amerindian language of the Andes, report the reverse mapping (i.e., past = forward, future = backward). However, this evidence comes from patterns of language use rather than movement. As such, it’s an open question as to whether this group would show movements consistent with our participants, or alternatively, consistent with their local patterns of language use.”

The question is an important one, he added: “It may help inform us about the origins of the sorts of effects we are reporting. That is, do we come to associate time with space in particular ways because of repeated exposure to language, (e.g., metaphors) or is the mechanism grounded in more basic, non-linguistic processes?”

“After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies,” the writer Cynthia Ozick once quipped in the Paris Review.

Apparently, one of those biographical facts we wear on our faces is our political affiliation. According to a study published this month in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, people can identify with remarkable accuracy (more than by chance guessing) whether another person is a Republican or a Democrat by simply looking at that person’s headshot.

How do we do it? By relying on stereotypes, the study found. Republicans, apparently, look “powerful” in our minds, and Democrats appear “warm.”

Of course, these kinds of stereotypes can lead to perceptual errors. “Not all Democrats appear warm and not all Republicans appear powerful,” wrote the study’s authors. “However, the linearity of these effects is noteworthy: appearing warmer led to a greater chance that a target would be perceived as a Democrat and appearing more powerful led to a greater chance that a target would be perceived as a Republican.”

Experiment #1
The study, which was conducted by Nalini Ambady, Ph.D., a social psychologist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and Tufts doctoral candidate Nicholas Rule, involved three separate experiments.

In the first experiment, 29 undergraduates were asked to categorize the faces of 118 unnamed professional politicians (2004 and 2006 U.S. Senate candidates).The photos (cropped to be of identical size and converted to grayscale) included women candidates, but minority candidates were excluded to avoid race-based stereotypes.

After the data was analyzed, the study found that participants had categorized the photos correctly at a rate that was significantly better than chance guessing. Those results held even when the responses of 10 participants who said they recognized at least one of the candidates were excluded from the calculations.

Experiment #2
To see if the results of the first experiment could be extended to other groups of people, the researchers conducted a second experiment. This time, they asked the participants to categorize the political affiliation of photos take from the senior yearbooks of a private U.S. university — photos of students who had described themselves in the yearbook as belonging to either a Democratic or Republican campus organization. (None of the participants in this experiment recognized any of the faces shown to them.)

Again, the participants’ categorization of the political affiliations of the students in the photos was significantly greater than chance guessing.

Experiment #3
Intrigued by these findings, the researchers decided to determine what, exactly, people were using to determine if someone were a Democrat or a Republican. They set up a third experiment in which participants were asked to rate the faces of college-aged Democrats and Republicans (without knowing who was whom) on three traits: dominance, facial maturity likability and trustworthiness.

They then took the data from these responses to form two composites: "Warmth" (an averaging of the mean scores for likability and trustworthiness) and "Power" (an averaging of the mean scores for dominance and facial maturity). (Such composites are commonly used for these kinds of experiments.)

Faces perceived to be that of Republican scored higher on the “Power” scale and those perceived to be that of a Democrat scored high on the “Warmth” scale.

Judging a book by its cover
Other research has pointed out that we’re quick to make snap judgments about the people we meet based on their appearance — and often, of course, unfairly. “People are known to form impression of others from their faces instantaneously and automatically,” write Rule and Ambady. “Moreover, these perceptions can have highly consequential outcomes, such as affecting the jobs that individuals are offered, their outcomes in court, and their financial success.”

Rule and Ambady also describe some truly provocative research about how election results can be predicted by the candidates’ facial traits:

Something to keep in mind as we head into this year’s heated (to put it mildly) election season.

The longer I’ve been a health writer, the more convinced I've become that exercise is the true fountain of youth.

That belief was reinforced on Monday with the publication of four new articles in the Archives of Internal Medicine linking physical activity with healthier aging.

“The promotion of physical activity may be the most effective prescription that physicians can dispense for the purposes of promoting successful aging,” wrote Jeff Williamson, MD, and Marco Pahor, MD, of the University of Florida’s Institute on Aging, in an editorial that accompanied the studies.

The health benefits of exercise, they added, include preventive effects related to “numerous age-related conditions, such as osteoarthritis, falls and hip fracture, cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases, cancer, diabetes mellitus, osteoporosis, low fitness and obesity, and decreased functional capacity.”

That list alone (and it could be easily extended to add other illnesses and conditions, including mild depression) should be enough to get each of us hitting the weight rooms, pools, walking paths, golf courses, tennis courts or wherever else we can give our heart and our other muscles a good workout — both aerobically and anaerobically.

Sharper thinking skills
Two of the studies published on Monday looked at the relationship between physical exercise and thinking skills (cognitive function). One study followed more than 3,000 people, aged 56 and older, for two years. None showed signs of cognitive impairment at the start of the study. Those participants who engaged in moderate or intense physical activity (for example, walking, bicycling, swimming, or gardening) at least once each week were less likely than those who never exercised to experience a decline in thinking skills.

Specifically, the incidence of new cognitive impairment among the study’s participants was 13.9 percent for those who didn’t exercise at all, 6.7 percent for those who exercised once or twice a week, and 5.1 percent for those who exercised three or more times a week.

Resistance training helps
In another study, Canadian researchers randomly assigned 155 women, aged 65 to 75 years, to either a once-weekly or twice-weekly resistance-training group (using both machine- and free-weights) or to a twice-weekly group that took a class in developing better muscle tone and balance through stretching, range-of-motion, core-strength and tai chi-like exercises.

The study found that the women who stuck with the resistance-training program for 12 months improved their scores by up to almost 13 percent on a series of cognitive tests (not memory, though), while the women in the tone-and-balance group exhibited a decline in cognitive skills of 0.5 percent.

Stronger bones
A third study randomized 246 elderly German women either to a multipurpose exercise program that emphasized intense physical activity or to a program that encouraged general well-being and low-intensity physical activity.

After 18 months, those in the high-intensity program had significantly denser spines and were less likely to experience a fall than their peers in the low-intensity program. There was no significant difference between the groups, however, in their risk of developing cardiovascular disease.

Better quality old age
The fourth study examined data from more then 13,000 participants in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study. It found a strong correlation between “midlife leisure-time physical activity and the odds of successful survival or exceptional overall health in later life.”  “Successful” was defined as living beyond age 70 without debilitating chronic diseases or significant limitations in physical or mental function.

The final word?
Each of these studies had its limitations, of course. The randomized, controlled studies were very small, for example, and the larger non-randomized studies revealed only an association, not a cause-and-effect connection, between exercise and better health.

To try to determine once and for if there is a strong connection between exercise and healthier aging, a new major randomized multicenter study, called Lifestyle Interventions and Independence for Elders (LIFE), is getting under way.  Recruiting begins soon.

It’ll be years before we know those results, however. In the meantime, if you aren't already doing so, get out there and exercise (after talking it over with your doctor, of course).

As Williamson and Pahor noted in their editorial: “Along with the expected results of the LIFE study, the 4 new studies in this issue of the Archives, and the evidence from clinical studies over the past 25 years, we have never had greater reason to be hopeful regarding the potential for exercise to become a proven and generalizable strategy for promoting successful aging in the expanding population of older adults.”