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Your health: Peapod partners with Weight Watchers

Peapod and Weight Watchers have launched a new partnership to help Chicago-area customers reach their weight loss goals at the office and at home.

Peapod.com's built-in sorting tool called NutriFilter helps shoppers make choices according to Weight Watchers' Points Plus program and other nutritional needs. By simply clicking on the Weight Watchers option in NutriFilter, Weight Watchers points are displayed item by item to help inform customers' decisions as they shop online or with the Peapod mobile app.

Weight Watchers also supports more than 300 At Work programs throughout the Chicago area. These small-group meetings among colleagues while at work are mentored by Weight Watchers leaders who will now be equipped with information on how to manage weekly meal and snack plans through Peapod.com.

"Because Peapod delivers to office and work locations, you can make sure you have good, brain-boosting, metabolism-boosting food choices on the job," said Terra Ayres, Weight Watchers spokesperson and Peapod customer.

Study: Junk food makes you lazy

A new study finds eating too much junk food doesn't only make you fat, it may also make you mentally slower or less motivated, CBS News reports. At least that seems to be true in lab rats.

For the study, published in the journal Physiology and Behavior, researchers at the University of California Los Angeles put rats on two different diets. Half of the rodents ate a healthy diet of unprocessed foods, such as ground corn and fish meal. The remaining half were given a high sugar, highly processed diet, similar to the junk food humans consume.

Within three months, the researchers observed remarkable differences between the two groups of rats. Mostly, they found the rats on the junk food diet were significantly fatter than the rats on a healthy diet. But the unhealthy rats were also less motivated, indicating that a poor diet had a serious impact on their tiny rodent brains.

When the researchers put the rats through certain tasks the differences become even more apparent. All of the rats were required to press a lever for a reward of food and water. The rats on the junk food diet were slower to act on the task .

The rats on the unhealthy diet took breaks that averaged around 10 minutes long, versus the healthy rats whose breaks lasted for about five minutes each.

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