Five Breaking Health Stories You Should Know

lots of individuals square measure captivated with looking at him break down, one piece at a time. Some experts think it’s because with all going on around the world— the crisis in the Middle East, the economy and, now, the heartbreaking destruction from the earthquake in Japan— people welcome a distraction that doesn’t affect them personally. As reported on HealthDay, author of the book Understanding Other People: The Five Secrets to Human Behavior, Beverly Flaxington says that watching Sheen can make people reflect positively on their own lives. Yes, thank goodness most of us are doing a lot better than he is.

Cheers for Caffeine

No have to be compelled to question your caffeine habit: a brand new profit has simply been added to the combo. A new study printed in Stroke: Journal of the yank Heart Association that checked out near to thirty-five,000 girls aged forty-nine to eighty-three found that those that drank a lot of than one cup of low on a daily basis had a down risk of stroke, compared with girls WHO drank less. And amazingly the study additionally found that drinking very little or no low was really related to a small increase within the risk for stroke. An earlier study from 2009 (the Nurses Health Study) had similar findings. Women WHO drank four or a lot of cups of low on a daily basis had a reduced risk of stroke compared with girls WHO had but one cup per month.

Phooey on Plastic

BPA: That’s the chemical in plastic containers and linings that can leach chemicals into the surrounding environment and into our bodies (known as endocrine disrupters). So, we’re safe avoiding products containing BPA, right? Maybe we tend to thought so— but this new study printed within the journal Environmental Health views proves otherwise. Researchers found that even in plastics labeled “BPA-free,” endocrine-disrupting chemicals can be leached. What’s extremely shuddery is that in some cases, the product labeled BPA-free leached even a lot of of the dangerous stuff than those containing BPA. Although no federal agency has made the move to declare BPA or any other endocrine-disrupting chemical products unsafe, you can’t ignore the fact that most Americans have some amount of BPA in their bodies (in fact, due to our ubiquitous use of plastics, Americans have been found to have twice the amount in our bodies compared to Canadians). What’s good to know is that some cities and states (Connecticut and Minnesota among them) are working toward restricting BPA in baby products, and China is reportedly moving toward a ban of BPA in children’s products.

Exercise Keeps You Young

Just how young, though? Try no grey hair, immeasurable energy, superior muscle mass, and brain volume. In mice, anyway. (But that is a decent beginning, no?) When mice who were genetically programmed to age quickly exercised regularly starting at 3 months old for five months (they ran the equivalent of a person’s running a 55-minute 10K 3 times per week beginning at age 20), they aged dramatically differently than the mice who were sedentary. Those poor inactive mice were hairless and frail, while these dynamos were like super-mice— lean, muscular, and youthful. They even were able to balance on narrow rods. No doubt, the fact that their gonads were healthy and intact (as opposed to the shrunken ovaries and testicles of the sedentary, aging mice) made the students working with the researcher, Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, very, very impressed (and possibly, training for their first marathon).

It Might Be Time to Rethink the Apple

Previous medical studies have declared apple-shaped folks with fat around their waists to be at a higher risk of a heart attack and stroke than pear-shaped people with fat concentrated around their bottoms and hips. Now a brand new study finds that though being fat could be a major risk issue for cardiopathy, specifically wherever the fat is on the body has no impact thereon risk. Obesity is an equal-opportunity killer, it seems. When it comes down to it, the best indicators of future heart risk are measures of blood pressure, cholesterol, and a history of diabetes.