Rebecca TobackHealth’An orange a day’

Health risks sometimes come from the most unlikely places. Riding in the car with the windows down or ordering a large salad when you eat out both seem harmless, but they can be a lot worse than you think.

Eating large portions

Big portions at restaurants are often considered a major detriment to a healthy lifestyle, but making a home-cooked meal can be equally unhealthy. When you cook at home you may not know what an accurate portion should look like or how to cook for a certain amount of people. Also, not cooking with the most nutritional ingredients may make your homemade dinner less healthy than a restaurant meal.

Salads are typically seen as the ‘diet’ food. The dressings in many of them, though, make the meal much higher in calories than you may expect. In an Applebee’s Grilled Chicken Caesar salad there are 1,190 calories and 75.4 grams of fat.

Sleeping with more than one pillow

The amount of pillows you sleep on each night is also something that could be affecting your health. Loading up on pillows puts a strain on your neck and spine and can lead to headaches and affect your blood pressure.

‘If you use two pillows you may be pushing your head forward and misaligning your spine,’ said Karyn Sackstein, D.C., a chiropractor from Long Island. ‘Doing this can cause tension on your spine and tension on your nervous system.’

Riding in cars with the windows open

Air pollutants aren’t the only negative aspect of cruising in the car with the windows down, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that riding in a convertible with the windows down may expose people to noise levels that, over time, can damage hearing, according to a study presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation. Research shows that noise levels over 85 decibels can result in hearing loss, and the study presented on Tuesday said that drivers are consistently exposed to noise levels between 88 and 90 decibels.

Only doing cardio at the gym

Going to the gym a few times a week is a step in the healthy direction, but if you go at all you should work on strength training in addition to cardio.

‘Lifting weights does not mean that you will become huge and not fit into your clothes,’ said Eliza Decker, assistant director of facilities, wellness and aquatics at Syracuse University. ‘Strength training is a good idea for students because … gaining strength will increase your basal metabolic rate, which means that even at rest your muscle cells are burning more calories than your fat cells.’

Rebecca Toback is a sophomore magazine journalism major and the health columnist. Her columns appear every Thursday. She can be reached at rltoback@syr.edu.

Published on October 7, 2009 at 12:00 pm