An exciting new exercise tool is coming to the United States soon from Japan. This super-firm pad, made from inter-woven fibers (hence, it’s call a “nest”) supports your body while you perform all sorts of exercises on it. It’s perfect for jogging in place, jumping and dancing, plus you can use it for extra leverage the way you’d use a Pilates ball — giving your situps, pushups, and other leverage-based exercises more efficiency. It also provides an excellent platform for elderly folks to workout with super-low impact. It’s also fun for kids and couples.

“Many actresses and athletes are fascinated by Vernest…it looks like a fancy coushion, but you’ll know its difference as soon as you put your body on it. Nothing else can give you the springiness and the floating feeling you get with Vernest. (more…)

Annmarie Kostyk is taking her readers on a quest for the most delicious chocolate in all of the United States with her third book, The Chocolate Travel Guide: United States Edition 2010.

All things chocolate are covered including bean to bar makers, chocolatiers, confectioners, chocolate festivals, luscious hotel chocolate buffets, chocolate classes for the novice and the professional, and chocolate travel destinations. This guide features over five hundred addresses and websites showing chocolate lovers where to go to meet all of their chocolate needs.

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Designer Health Foods

Here’s an antioxidant berry juice I want at my next dinner party. It’s a goji berry drink packaged in a light-bulb-shaped bottle and dubbed gloji. I personally gave this one the best design award at the 2008 Natural Products Expo West in Los Angeles. It’s about as bright an idea as you can get. The gloji web site is as design-rich as the product. Go to www.gloji.com.

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Interesting Health Sites

Why Did the Tomato Go Out with the Prune? Because it couldn’t find a date! Here’s another: What’s small, red and whispers? The answer…a horse radish! These and other vegetable jokes are available at the Raw Food Diet website, along with a raw helping of articles, recipes, and quizzes…all about food or raw foods. Even if you’re not a raw foods supporter, you’ll find something interesting that you probably didn’t know before. See it all at www.rawguru.com.

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From the Blogs

The Healthbolt blog by Liz and Liberty is a humorous and often enlightening collection of tips, tidbits and practices that will keep you coming back for more. Some highlights include the recent collection of humorous exercise videos in “The Lighter Side of Exercise” the truth about what’s really on your toothbrush but smaller than the eye can see and the interesting Hara Hachi Bu practice of eating until you’re 80% full. You’ll also find out what seven health myths are just bunk and how spandex can help you avoid jet lag. It’s all at Healthbolt.
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This week’s food & health web picks include a some stories from the newswires and a few great blog entries. Our focus this week is on health and diet…

Top Stories…

Dieting is Out.This article at MSNBC reveals how Americans are more and more inclined to pass up dieting in favor of healthy food choices. Deprivation and suffering is seemingly no longer associated with losing weight, according to a poll. What’s more, people are more likely to consider a “heavy” person to be attractive, even though most folks still want to lose around 20 pounds. Read the entire story here.

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