The more the emotional memories involving temper, frustration, anxiety, depression, impulse, and fear pile up in early adolescence, the more the amygdala can “hijack the rest of the brain,” Goleman says, “by flooding it with strong and inappropriate emotions, causing us to wonder later, ‘Why did I overreact?”’ 

        But if the emotions stored in the brain are those of restraint, self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, empathy, hope, and optimism, then we become endowed with an “emotional intelligence” that serves rather than enslave us for the rest of our lives. 

        Under stress, we all tend to seek comfort – sometimes in not-so-healthy ways – but a new study suggests that challenging experiences are as likely to promote good habits as they are to support bad ones. 

        In several different experiments, researchers including Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, found that under various types of stress, all types of habits got stronger – not just the ones that cause trouble. 

        “When your willpower is low and you have little motivational energy, you are likely to fall back into old, bad habits of eating too much and not exercising – but only if those are, in fact, your habits,” says Wood. “Our novel finding is that people fall back into good habits in just the same way.” The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

        Stress depletes willpower; indeed, the brain is wired so that extreme stress actually shuts down the higher regions involved in long-term planning and thoughtful consideration. That’s because those functions are superfluous when survival is at stake. When under threat, the brain relies on faster, more primitive regions whose behavior is largely automatic under such circumstances. Automatic doesn’t mean built-in; however, many of our automatic behaviors, like riding a bike or eating French fries when feeling anxious, become automatic through repetition.

        Proponents of “genetically modified” (GM) foods argue using biotechnology in the production of food products has many benefits. It speeds up the process of breeding plants and animals with desired characteristics, can be used to introduce new characteristics that a product wouldn’t normally have, and can improve the nutritional value of products. 

        Groups who advocate against the use of GM foods don’t see things quite the same way. They point to studies that argue GM foods could be harmful to people’s health. To the groups on this side of the issue, that “could” provide more than enough reason to go forward with extreme caution, something they say isn’t currently being done. In Europe, hardly a week goes by without some headline about GM foods or, rather, “Frankenfoods” as they’ve been called by the European media. 

        The World Health Organization (WHO) showed in a 1990 analysis that four major Mediterranean countries (Spain, Greece, France, and Italy) have longer life expectancies and lower rates of heart disease and cancer than other European countries and America. Scientists have ruled out genetic differences, because Mediterraneans who move to other countries tend to lose their health advantages.

        Angelina Jolie’s chances of developing breast cancer were so high because she inherited a mutated BRCA 1 gene from her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 56. The BRCA1 is present in everyone but only mutates in one in 1,000 people. Anyone with the mutation has a 50-80% chance of developing breast cancer. But Jolie’s risk figure was calculated to be even higher because of other factors, including family history. 

        “There are various computer programs where you can input genetic information, family history and other things and it will calculate a figure, which is why she’s got this very precise sounding number,” says Dr. Kat Arney, a senior science manager at Cancer Research UK. 

        Breast cancer is already “the top cancer in women both in the developed and the developing world”, according to the World Health Organization - and in many countries, it’s becoming more common. Overall, a woman living in the UK has a 12% chance of getting breast cancer during her lifetime. It’s the same in the US. But increasing longevity isn’t the only reason for the high incidence of breast cancer. 

        “There is an increase in rates in younger women and it’s for a number of reasons. We know that women’s lifestyles are changing and being overweight and drinking a lot of alcohol is linked to breast cancer risk,” says Arney. 

        Changes in reproductive habits are also a factor. According to Cancer Research UK, the relative risk of developing breast cancer is estimated to increase by 3% for each year an adult woman delays becoming a mother. Women who breastfeed also reduce their risk. The longer a woman breastfeeds, the greater the protection. It’s estimated that risk is reduced by 4% for every 12 months of breastfeeding. This may explain why women in richer countries have a higher risk of breast cancer. African women are four times less likely to get the disease because they have children at a younger age, have more of them and breastfeed them for longer.

        BMI is a crude measure for evaluating the health of individuals. Some researchers contend that what really matters is the distribution of fat tissue on the body, with excess abdominal fat being most dangerous; others say that cardiovascular fitness predicts mortality regardless of BMI or abdominal fat. “BMI is just a first step for anybody,” says Steven Stone, an obesity researcher. “If you can then add waist circumference and blood tests and other risk factors, then you can get a more complete description at the individual level.” 

        If the obesity-paradox studies are correct, the issue then becomes how to convey their nuances. A lot of excess weight, in the form of obesity, is clearly bad for health, and most young people are better off keeping trim. But that may change as they age and develop illnesses. 

        Some public-health experts fear, however, that people could take that message as a general endorsement of weight gain. Willett says that he is also concerned that obesity-paradox studies could undermine people’s trust in science. “You hear it so often, people say: ‘I read something one month and then a couple of months later I hear the opposite. Scientists just can’t get it right.’” he says. “We see that time and time again being exploited, by the soda industry, in the case of obesity, or by the oil industry, in the case of global warming.” 

        Preventing weight gain in the first place should be the primary public-health goal, Willett says. “It’s very challenging to lose weight once you’re obese. That’s the most serious consequence of saying there’s no problem with being overweight. We want to have people motivated not to get there in the first place.”