5 Blogs Before Lunch

Sample Entry:

Apparently, sugary soft drinks not only rot your teeth and promote weight gain, they may also cause cancer.

A long-term study of 60,000 Singaporeans found that sugary soft drinks drastically increase the risk of developing pancreatic cancer.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota followed thousands of men and women participating in the Singapore Chinese Health Study for 14 years. At the end of the study, published this month in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, the team found that those drank two or more soft drinks a week had an 87 percent higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer.

Back of the Cereal Box

Sample Entry:

It may be one short, "citation needed" sentence in the Wikipedia entry for the Super Mario Bros. theme, but it was enough to get me thinking. It claims that there’s a certain resemblance between the song and Van Halen’s "Jump" and it’s rumored that the latter at least partially inspired the former. I’d never heard this before and couldn’t find it anywhere else online, but I have to admit that listening to "Jump" now, I can hear a slight similarity between the opening synth notes and the basic melody of the Mario song.

Twirlit

Sample Entry:

Yay, another thing you love is going to kill you. According to CBS News, a new study has found that soda drinkers have an increased risk of developing pancreatic cancer. The findings from the University of Minnesota claim that people who drink as few as two soft drinks a week face almost double the risk of the disease, which is one of the deadliest cancers.

"Their risk of getting pancreatic cancer over the time period of the study was almost two times higher than their counterparts who were consuming little or no sugar-sweetened beverages in the study," said Dr. Mark Pereira. Ah, so that’s the thing. It’s only regular soda that’s the enemy. I know aspartame (and now, Splenda) will probably kill me in different ways, but it seems that us Diet Coke (and Diet Snapple and Diet 7Up and Diet Everything) drinkers are at least safe from pancreatic cancer.