That's Fit

Many competitive athletes have to undergo drug tests. Is drug testing for scholars in our future, too? According to the UK's Academy of Medical Sciences, certain drugs have been used by healthy people to boost alertness and mental awareness.

Aricept (an Alzheimer's treatment), Ritalin (for ADHD), and modafinil (for day-time sleepiness) have been used by some people to get an edge up on tests and exams. Like steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs used by some athletes, this gives the student an unfair advantage. Also like steroids, using drugs in ways other than they are prescribed for can be seriously detrimental to health.

Hormones produced by the thyroid gland have a significant effect on your health, particularly on your metabolism -- from the rate at which your heart beats to how quickly you burn calories.

As long as the proper amount of hormones are released by your thyroid, everything is as cool as school and your system function remains status quo. But sometimes your thyroid decides to become a bit derelict in its duties and fails to produce enough hormones, resulting in the disruption of the balance of chemical reactions in your body. This condition is known as hypothyroidism.

This problem -- even if the thyroid is only mildly underactive -- is certainly worth paying attention to. A study published in the American Journal of Medicine suggests that even a slight aberration in the activity of the thyroid can raise the risk of heart disease by as much as 65 percent. If you or someone you know is showing signs and symptoms of what may be an underactive thyroid, speak to a doctor about having a blood test done.

Are there 100 calories in 18 Fat Free Rold Gold Tiny Twist Pretzels or in 25? If you picked 18, you are correct. How about two dark chocolate kisses or five dark chocolate kisses -- which serving has 100 calories? Good news: You can have five kisses for 100 calories.

Women's Health magazine puts readers to the 100-calorie test with this online questionnaire. Even better than my two previous questions, this survey features photos of various foods in their competing serving sizes and asks you to pick the 100-calorie portion.

Shrimp and cocktail sauce, peanuts and dried cranberries, baby carrots and hummus, bagel and doughnut portions, even McDonald's French fries are a few of the foods that make an appearance in this quiz. It's sure to help you fine-tune your snack smarts. So get started. And best wishes for a stellar test score.

Do you remember taking the Presidential Fitness Test in elementary school? I was one of those crazy kids who LOVED it -- I was naturally athletic and I kept active, so it wasn't hard for me to pass. And I love tests that I know I can pass.

I received an email from Active.com encouraging me to try The Special Ops Fitness Test the other day. "How bad can it be?" I asked myself. I work hard, and I push myself. I can at least give it a good shot, right?

Wrong.

Okay, so I failed. I failed badly ... this time. But I now have some really tough goals to meet. Want to see what they are? Check the gallery! And, let me know how well you did!

Cancer is everywhere. Still, researchers and scientists and doctors don't fully understand the disease. Either does the average American. When the American Cancer Society put 1,000 people to the test, these four questions stumped many respondents. Sixty-eight percent got the first one wrong.

Now it's your turn. Which of the following are true?

1. The risk of dying from cancer is increasing in the U.S.

2. Your risk of lung cancer is greater if you live in a polluted city than if you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day.

3. Some injuries can cause cancer later in life.

4. Some or all of the following cause cancer: cell phones, deodorant, antiperspirant, under-wire bras.

Mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder are very hard for psychiatrists to diagnose sometimes. It's a subjective procedure requiring the patient to tell the professional about his or her symptoms. After that, the doctor must give a judgment which ultimately diagnoses the patient.

But what if medical professionals were able to test the blood and detect whether or not a person had bipolar disorder or depression? This could, theoretically, eliminate the need for subjective judgments on people's mental state. However, some folks believe this is too accurate.

The ethical concerns stem from the fact that ten genes have been shown to reveal a person's mental status. Personality characteristics are controversial in medicine, and a test that can allegedly tell a person if they're unstable could cause a bigger rift. However, if used properly, this seems like a more effective way to treat patients of psychiatry. We'll have to keep an eye on this for future developments!

I'm not real concerned with the number attached to my body fat composition. But I have been curious about how it may have changed since last April when a fitness instructor at Tucson's Canyon Ranch pinched me here and there and told me I registered at 24 percent on the body fat scale. Since then, I've lost 15 pounds and spent considerable amounts of time working out. Surely, I have less fat, right? I mean there's less skin on my body. That must mean there's less fat to pinch.

I do think my body is carrying around less fat. It looks like it is, anyway. But that's about all I have to go on because after meeting with another fitness instructor today, I came away with a few new numbers. One was high. One was low. One right in the middle.

My first pinch test -- my instructor pinched my fat and measured with calipers a chunk of skin on my right arm, my side, and my thigh -- put me in the 27 percent body fat category. Ouch. My second test, with a device I held out in front of my face (height and weight were the only considerations for this one) told me I was in the 20 percent range -- I like this one. And my third test, a re-do of the pinch test, summed me up as a girl with 24.6 percent body fat.

What ever do I do with this information? Nothing, I suppose, except conclude that there really is no surefire way to detect how much fat is storing itself on this body of mine. Which is fine with me. I was just curious. And now my curiosity is satisfied.

For more on body fat measurement options, click here.

Here is the perfect excuse for you to use the next time your boss gives you a hard time for making small talk with co-workers instead of finishing that budget analysis ...

A recent study, led by Dr. Oscar Ybarra, found that chatting with others help us to store and sort information. In effect, according to Dr. Ybarra, these little conversations actually make us smarter.

In the study, Dr. Ybarra and a team of researchers had a group of college students discuss social issues before taking a test to measure mental acuity. They found that these students scored much better than students who were not told to speak to each other before the test.

So, as I said before, you now have the ultimate excuse for chatting up your co-workers. If your boss gives you a hard time, just tell him or her that you're busy making yourself smarter!!

Yes, Oprah Winfrey has gained weight. Again. But it's not her diet or a lack of exercise to blame for the 20 pounds she's recently acquired. It's her thyroid.

Oprah revealed on her show last week that she's been plagued by thyroid problems which have led to her run-down -- and heavier -- state.

"My body was turning on me," she wrote in the new issue of O magazine. "First hyperthyroidism, which sped up my metabolism and left me unable to sleep for days. (Most people lose weight. I didn't.) Then hypothyroidism, which slowed down my metabolism and made me want to sleep all the time."

So the Body Mass Index (BMI) may not be the best indicator of obesity. It only accounts for height and weight and gives a whole host of other factors (muscle mass, for one) no attention at all. There's also the skin fold test, or pinch test. I called my local health and fitness center to inquire about this option -- I'd really like to see where I fall on the body fat spectrum after losing some weight -- and I was told it's not all that accurate either. Since the skin is pinched and measured using calipers, it's difficult to grab the same fat each time it's done. Obviously, this can skew results. So where do I go now for a precise evaluation of my fat?

I could go for a waist-hip ratio -- a tape measure is used around the waist and hips -- but this won't tell me exactly how much fat I'm carrying around. That leaves one method -- hydrostatic weighing. It happens to be the only route recommended by the fitness trainer I spoke with on the phone, and it involves a whole lot of water and a whole lot of exhaling.

Hydrostatic weighing works like this: After expelling all of the air from the lungs, a person is repeatedly submerged in water for five to 10 seconds. It's a very reliable measure, the gold standard really for assessment of body composition. It can be scary for those who fear the underwater world, but it works and is available at various health and fitness centers.

What do you think -- would you get dunked to capture the essence of your own body fat?

Let's face it, nobody enjoys going for their yearly Pap test. It's just one of those parts of being an adult that we women do because it's good for our health (and unfortunately way too many women don't bother at all). I assume men feel the same way about prostrate exams. It's not fun, but still we've got to get it done.

The good news is that apparently a new, more effective test to screen for cervical cancer has been developed. A study conducted at McGill University, which is about to published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that the HPV test was able to detect pre-cancerous lesions in up to 94.6% of study participants while the Pap test discovered only 55.4%. That's a pretty major difference, especially where cancer screening is concerned.

Also, according to the article, women who receive negative results from an HPV test, which screens for the HPV virus which causes most if not all cases of cervical cancer, will only have to repeat the exam every 3 years. Unfortunately, those who have the HPV test and receive a positive result will also have to undergo the Pap test to check for pre-cancerous cells. If you want to know more about the study, take a look at the entire article here and for more information on the HPV test, consult your physician.

One of the most devastating aspects of fighting cancer can be the long and exhausting courses of treatment. From what I've read and heard, dealing with the physical and emotional after-affects of chemotherapy and radiation can be as difficult as dealing with the disease itself.

A test developed by a scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia promises to ease some of the suffering associated with cancer treatments. Basically, a dye is injected into patients receiving chemotherapy and radiation, and molecules in the die attach to any dead or dying cancer cells, allowing doctors to see whether or not the treatment is actually working.

Until now, patients had to endure entire courses of treatment that could last up to six months before being able to assess whether or not their tumors where shrinking, had stayed the same or were growing larger. If the treatment hadn't worked, patients would have to undergo a new, exhausting course of treatment. The new dye test will hopefully allow doctors to tell right away whether or not the treatment on a particular patient is working based on whether or not there is evidence of dead or dying cancer cells.

Hopefully the test will cut down on the trauma associated with chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

The Body Mass Index (BMI) measurement is not all it's cracked up to be. It's a good guide and can offer a general view of your placement on the obesity continuum, but it's based on height and weight alone -- and herein lies the problem.

BMI doesn't take into account body frame or muscle mass and in one recent study cited in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports, 60 percent of women were heavier or thinner than their BMI calculations indicated.

Next time you're in the market for determining your true size, ask for a skin fold test at your doctors office or your local fitness club. Let someone actually pinch that fat. Then, you'll know more clearly where you stand.

Think you always know what the best choice is when you're eating out? Why not put that to the test? This Men's Health Quiz called Eat This, Not That has some pretty tough choices. Here's what you do: you're given two choices between two food options and you have to pick which is the healthiest, and I guarantee, some of the answers will surprise you. You do this for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and drinks.

I consider myself to be fairly up my food news but I only got 4/11 on one of the sections. What about you?

How flexible are you? Take a minute and answer carefully...what did you come up with? Probably hard to say since it's a subjective thing and it's difficult to measure, but when coming up with an answer did you just consider your abilities or did you actually get down on the floor and test yourself?

Well if you didn't then you should, because not only will you feel better and do your body some good but you'll increase your own awareness of what your body can and can't do. Being more in touch with your own system will help you both avoid injuries and can motivate you by getting you that much more in touch with the positive effects of exercise!

Click here for a body flexibility test you can do at home.