Here are the warning signs of vitamin D deficiency most people ignore! Over 40% of American adults, and approximately 1 billion people worldwide are deficient in vitamin D. That’s a lot of people walking around lacking in this vital nutrient. As you may already know, lack of vitamins or a vitamin deficiency can cause serious health consequences if not addressed.
Some foods are considerably healthier than others from a nutritional perspective, and certain foods are considered extra beneficial by health professionals and nutritionists. Black pepper is just such an example. Not only is black pepper a useful flavoring element, but it’s also a rich source of minerals and nutrients. Best of all, it’s easy to incorporate black pepper into your diet. Read this guide to find out more about this versatile seasoning.
Black pepper is actually a flowering vine indigenous to India that is grown for its fruit. When it is ripe, the plant’s fruit is dried and the peppercorn is born. You can buy peppercorns whole or purchase the product as a pre ground pepper seasoning.
An alkaloid called piperine gives black pepper its familiar spicy bite. Some people grind peppercorns in a mill at home. Many prefer this practice because it usually produces a fresher, more flavorful seasoning. Black pepper has been a part of human culture for millennia, both as a flavoring agent and as a medicinal remedy.
Anyone with siblings likely remembers a childhood spent imitating just about everything their brothers and sisters did. But according to researchers from the University of Cologne, this isn’t something you grow out of. In fact, the influence a brother or sister has on a person’s life carries on well into adulthood. Their study—which was just published in Advances in Life Course Research—analyzed data from a 32-year timeframe, and their findings led researchers to discover that people will often get married, divorced, or become a parent after seeing their sibling do it first, The Daily Mail reports.
To come to this conclusion, the team collected data from 4,521 people from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) that contained marital and family life information from 1984 to 2016. The biggest discovery was actually related to siblings’ influence on marriage. “An individual’s propensity to marry increases after a sibling’s marriage and remain significant in the long-term,” the researchers said. “This finding is in line with the idea that a sibling’s entry into marriage may exert pressure, especially through parents, to form a family.”
Having kids of their own also pushes a sibling to become a parent—this influence only lasting for a few years, though. “Similar to previous research, we find this effect to be short-lived, peaking in the first three years [of a child’s life] and declining afterward,” the scientists noted. And when it comes to seeing a brother or sister getting a divorce, the researchers found that other siblings will be less likely to tie the knot themselves down the road.
Zafer Buyukkececi, the lead author for the study, noted that their findings reveal that sibling relationships are a cornerstone in a family dynamic: “Taken together, our results support the idea that the process of family formation is interdependent among siblings.”
