Hulkamania GAINZZZ: Hulk Hogan says he's dropped 40 pounds after giving up booze 8 months ago.

Lookin' good, brother!

Two-time WWE Hall of Famer Hulk Hogan was "sick and tired of being sick and tired" of himself after years of binge drinking alcohol -- with 40 fewer pounds to prove it.

Hogan, 70, said his abstinence from alcohol started on New Year's Eve because he wanted to take a small break from the booze, but has now been eight months since his last sip.

"It changed everything," Hogan told TMZ founder Harvey Levin and executive producer Charles Latibeaudiere.

Hogan, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, revealed that his drinking would lead to munching on junk food and overeating.

He's noticed remarkable changes when he cut alcohol and junk food and focused on his daily exercise.

"I wasn't eating late at night -- I wasn't eating junk food anymore. I dropped like 40 pounds right away," Hogan told the outlet.

The Hulkster explained he knew he was due for a change after his drinking and binge eating began to take after noticing his joints would flare up.

A lot of chronic conditions are due to diet. And not just on the macro level. But some people can digest, for example, gluten without incident, but other people will get cramps and diarrhea (or worse) from it. I know Jordan Peterson's daughter cured herself of several maladies -- I think a serious autoimmune disorder -- from pursing an "eliminationist" diet in which she cut out everything but meat.

Some of the things she cut out turned out to have been causing her problems. I don't know if she ever identified what those were.

"We'd have beers before the matches. Beers after the matches. And we'd go to the hotel and all meet down at the bar. It was kinda like part of the whole wrestling genre," the 70-year-old American icon said.
Speaking of beer: Alcohol doesn't make people seem more attractive and "beer goggles" are a myth, says deeply flawed study conducted by virgin nerds who never got their willies wet.

Many a person has blamed "beer goggles" following a regrettable one-night stand, but a new study suggests that there's no such thing.

Rather, alcohol acts more like "liquid courage," according to findings published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs -- you become more likely to approach people you already find attractive, rather than alcohol making others appear more attractive.

"People who drink alcohol may benefit by recognizing that valued social motivations and intentions change when drinking in ways that may be appealing in the short term but possibly harmful in the long term," lead researcher Molly Bowdring, of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, said in a journal news release.

Conventional wisdom has long held that intoxication makes other people seem better looking, but the phenomenon hasn't been systematically studied, researchers said.

The "study" is weak. They asked subjects to rate people's looks, when the subjects were both sober and inebriated. This is... this far removed from a genuine Beer Goggles Scenario.

They attempted to make the looking-at-pictures game more "realistic" by telling the subjects they could, maybe, meet and date the people they were rating.

This is stupid. I don't even know why I have to explain this.

Beer Goggles is a phenomenon regarding people you're looking to pick up and go to bed with within the next couple of hours. It's not about looking at pictures and saying "Gee I'd maybe like to meet her one day." Beer Goggles don't do Hypotheticals and Contingent Possible Future Dating Scenarios. It's a very pragmatic, real-world-results oriented thing.

...

The researchers did not find evidence of beer goggles. Intoxication played no role in how attractive participants found other people.

I think this study was conducted by people trying to convince themselves that they weren't just the 2-at-10, 10-at-2 consolation prize.

You know what they should study? Ace of Spades Commenter Section Goggles. Guys walk into these comments and start proclaiming they'd bang virtually anything.

Dudes, save that kind of talk for 11:50 pm. Game faces, dudes.

Regular readers and commenters on the Ace of Spades website have a lower risk of dementia, a new study says.

The study speaks vaguely of "use of the internet" but I know they mean "reading AoSHQ."

Older adults who [read Ace of Spades] regularly have nearly half the risk of dementia as adults with limited internet use, according to a report in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study also suggested that the more years of regular [consumption of AoS content], the more pronounced the dementia benefits become.

"Our findings show evidence of a digital divide in the cognitive health of older-age adults," wrote Gawon Cho, B.A., B.B.A., Rebecca Betensky, Ph.D., and Virginia Chang, M.D., Ph.D., of New York University. The benefits of regular [AoS use] did not vary based on race/ethnicity, sex, educational attainment, or generation. "Therefore, we did not find evidence that the internet has exacerbated socioeconomic disparities in the burden of dementia."

Cho and colleagues used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), an ongoing biennial survey of community-dwelling adults aged 50 years and older. Since 2002, HRS participants have been asked the following yes/no survey question: "Do you regularly use the World Wide Web, or the Internet, for sending and receiving e-mail or for any other purpose, such as making purchases, searching for information, or [reading cruel commentary on the Ace of Spades HQ website]?" Based on participants' baseline response to this question, they were divided into two groups: regular [Ace of Spades] users or nonregular [Ace of Spades] users.

...

The researchers found that adults who [commented under fake names at the Ace of Spades website] regularly at baseline had a 43% reduced risk of dementia during the follow-up period. The benefits seemed to be cumulative; that is, for every survey period in which a participant reported regular [Ace of Spades] use, dementia risk dropped by about 20%.

"Since a person's [Ace] engagement may include a wide range of activities, future research may identify different patterns of internet usage associated with the cognitively healthy lifespan while being mindful of the potential side effects of excessive usage," Cho and colleagues concluded.

You're welcome.

On the other hand: Social media is one of the worst things that ever happened to our society, Legal Insurrection says.

But then again, scientists warn that reading Legal Insurrection actually increases your risk of dementia. So consider the source!

Scientists say they've discovered another "breakthrough" in fighting one form of childhood cancer.

A particularly aggressive form of childhood cancer that forms in muscle tissue might have a new treatment option on the horizon.

Scientists have successfully induced rhabdomyosarcoma cells to transform into normal, healthy muscle cells. It's a breakthrough that could see the development of new therapies for the cruel disease, and it could lead to similar breakthroughs for other types of human cancers.

"The cells literally turn into muscle," says molecular biologist Christopher Vakoc of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

"The tumor loses all cancer attributes. They're switching from a cell that just wants to make more of itself to cells devoted to contraction. Because all its energy and resources are now devoted to contraction, it can't go back to this multiplying state."

...

Rhabdomyosarcoma is aggressive, and often deadly; survival rates for the intermediate risk group are between 50 and 70 percent.