Travel in Style…to a Treehouse

treehouseIf you’ve always wanted to get away from it all up in a tree, now is your chance. Nick and Tara Culverhouse were trying to figure out how to preserve a tree that is on the grounds of their 200 year old hotel. And they have done so by turning it into its own little hotel.

The house has a master bedroom on the top floor, a room for two kids with bunk beds and a sitting room on the main floor and a full kitchen and bathroom.


Staying in this tree house won’t be a cheap holiday, as the unique location on the grounds of the Fox and Hounds Country Hotel in Eggesford, Devon starts at £245 a night.

Calculate Your Life Expectancy

Have you ever wondered how long you’re going to live? And how much your lifestyle habits are influencing your life expectancy?

These are the questions that are addressed in the life expectancy calculator below. Called Project Big Life, it was created by a team that was investigating the deaths of 70,000 people while looking at how health behaviors affect the risk of death. Canadian medical experts, along with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and others have created the calculator.

 

What would you like us to calculate for you?

Age:     (between 20 and 79 years)
Sex
Height: cm   or
Weight: kg   or   pounds

 

Smoking Status
What is your smoking status?

 

Alcohol Consumption
How often do you consume alcoholic beverages?

 

Fruit & Vegetable Diet
How many times did you have each of the following in the past week?
Fruit juice: (0 to 70)
Fruit: (0 to 70)
Salad: (0 to 70)
Potatoes: (0 to 70)
Carrots: (0 to 70)
Other vegetables: (0 to 70)

 

Leisure Physical Activity
How much time did you spend jogging or running in the past week?
(0 to 35) hours

 

How much time did you spend playing ice hockey, soccer, basketball, volleyball, or rollerblading in the past week?
(0 to 35) hours

 

How much time in the past week did you spend doing other leisure activities? (i.e. walking, cycling, gardening, exercising, golfing, bowling, skating, fishing, baseball, tennis etc.)
(0 to 35) hours

 

Self-Perceived Stress
Thinking about the amount of stress in your life, would you say that most days are:

 

 

Postal Code (Optional):   (e.g. K1Y 4E9) Postal code is used to adjust for geographic variations
Did you immigrate to Canada?

 

What is your Household Income?

 

Which of the following Conditions do you have?

 

Does illness limit your ability to participate in activities?
Provide this information if you would like to see the probability of living until a future event of your choice.
For example, will I live to see
    – the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup?
– my grandchild get married?
– my grandchild’s graduation?
– my retirement?
– my 100th birthday?
Event name:   (e.g. Your child’s or grandchild’s wedding)
Event year:     (YYYY – e.g. 2019)

 

 

Terracotta Army…Made from Pizza Dough

picture from WENN.com
picture from WENN.com

If you can’t get to China to see the famous Terracotta Army – then maybe you can see them at the PizzaExpress chain in Beijing. Opening soon, the chain decided to have British food artist Annabel de Vetten recreate the entire Terracotta Army – out of pizza dough.

That’s right. The artist who specializes in cakes for her company Conjurer’s Kitchen, used PizzaExpress’s signature dough to create each warrior. The warriors have been recreated in such detail that each one has a different hair style and realistic folds in his clothes.

The Beijing PizzaExpress will join many other eateries at the Taikoo Li shopping center in Sanlitun, but chances are none of them will have quite such an elaborate display as part of their restaurant.

Prudent Advice About Prunes

prunesWe all know that prunes are good for constipation, but little did we know that they are great for dieting too. Liverpool University researchers tracked the weight and appetite of 100 overweight and obese men and women who were being given dieting advice.

Half were given prunes to snack on. The men who were given prunes were asked to eat 170g a day, about 15 prunes. The women were asked to eat 140g, or about a dozen, a day.

At the end of the three month study, both sets of groups lost about four pounds of weight and an inch off of their waistlines. However, the ones who ate the prunes felt fuller and had faster weight loss.

As Jason Halford explained, the appetite-suppressing effect of the prunes outweighed the damage done by the sugar content of the food.

As Professor Halford (who, by the way, received funding from the California Prune Board) said, “One of the biggest problems with dieting is that it makes you hungry. This doesn’t necessarily mean that prunes are the new weight loss miracle but they don’t undermine dieting.”

In addition, he mentioned that eating the prunes could also help you to achieve your goal of having five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

Emotional Eating Starts Young, Study Finds

cookiesBelgian researchers recently explored the roots of emotional eating and found surprising results. Children as young as five will turn to food when they are anxious or stressed. The Belgian team asked more than 300 children who were between the ages of five and ten about their lives. The parents also answered questions in a questionnaire about how often their children ate certain foods.

The results certainly showed a correlation between the stress in a child’s life and the sweets they ate. Researcher Nathalie Michels of Ghent University also showed that levels of the hormone cortisol rose as the stress did.

As a result of the study, Dr. Michels is encouraging schools and parents to teach children how to cope with stress. As she said, “Parents and children should be made aware that stress can influence emotional eating behavior, so they can pay attention to potential triggers and anticipate this behavior. Furthermore, children should be equipped with stress-coping skills, such as problem-solving or asking for help, instead of seeking solace in food.”

Adding to the discussion, Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum said, “From the moment that an infant is born it learns that sweetness brings comfort. It should therefore be of no surprise that it is sophisticated enough, even by age five, to know that it’ll feel better about some unhappy event having eaten a chocolate biscuit or something sugary.”

Get Your Lick Here: The Edible Mist Machine

It looks like something straight out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it’s not a story.

Charlie Harry Francis loves inventing things with food. But he doesn’t invent them in the way that you or I would, perhaps. Having grown up on an ice cream farm in South Wales with his dad, an ice cream maker, and his mom, a baker and confectionary maker, Charlie loves finding new ways to deliver food to people.

So far, as his website explains, he’s invented: “the Popcorn Hairdryer, Nitro Ice Cream Buggy, Soup Washing Machine, Gramophone Ice Cream Pottery Wheel, Edible Mist Machine, Instant Lollipop Maker, Whirligig Candyfloss Whirlwind, Levitron Cocktail levitating Device, Glow in the Dark Ice Cream and the Olfactic Dog Nose.”

His latest creation, featured in the video below, is a machine that uses ultrasonic vaporization to create a microscopic mist. You suck this mist through a straw and get an instant flavor hit. And you can enjoy over two hundred flavors this way! This includes everything you could imagine from fois gras and tiramisu to butter, popcorn and beyond. And it’s all calorie free.


It’s called the Edible Mist Machine and it’s created by Charlie and his company Lick Me I’m Delicious. As Charlie explains,”It messes with your mind because your brain expects something to be in your mouth. It’s a pretty fun machine, the range of flavours is massive and we can also produce you a personalised mist from pretty much anything in the World like your favourite book or even your hair.  And it’s zero calories.”

Check it out below. And get ready to salivate.