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In the Psychology Today article Spicing Up Your Memory, it is revealed that a 2003 study involving 44 healthy young adults – not seniors suffering from memory loss – showed sage oil improves short-term memory. While this study is intriguing, I would like to know the following:
1) Would these findings hold in a much larger experimental group? Presumably only 22 of the 44 received the sage oil. That’s a small number of people on whom to base this conclusion about sage oil’s effects.
2) Was this placebo-controlled study also double blind?
3) How many milligrams of sage oil did each member of the experimental group receive?
4) Would the desired effects last over a period of several months, or do the benefits wane with use of the supplement?
Also worth noting is the article’s statement that “… the clinical trials conducted so far have used sage oil extracted from a species different from the common garden sage.”
The Law of Conservation of Energy (aka. the first law of thermodynamics) states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. So what is the logic behind the term renewable energy? The energy from burned oil hasn’t left the universe at all. That energy cannot be “made new” since it has been around for billions of years and will exist as long as the universe itself does. Thus, just as one doesn’t create new energy, no form of energy is truly renewable. We can only change the form of an energy source and then use it to our advantage.
