A new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge suggests that men’s immune systems are aren’t as strong as women’s—in part because, throughout evolution men’s bodies prioritized procreation over the development of immunity—and that they are more susceptible to illness, and suffer it more severely as a result, the
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After at least three infants died of suffocation while being carried in Infantino “SlingRider” or “Wendy Bellissimo” baby slings, the San Diego-based company issued a recall of 1 million of the products in the U.S. and 15,000 throughout Canada. Earlier this month a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission …
Adding to previous research suggesting that incremental increases in the cost of alcohol can yield significant health and financial benefits, a new study published online this week in the journal The Lancet suggests that slightly increasing the per unit cost of alcohol could prompt people to drink less, resulting in fewer cases of
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For middle-aged women who aren’t counting calories, how much exercise does it take to keep off extra weight? According to a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, roughly an hour per day. Though current recommendations from the Department of Health and Human Services suggest that a weekly 150
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Rats given high-fructose corn syrup were more likely to put on excess weight compared with those who ate sucrose (common table sugar), even when both groups consumed the same total number of calories, according to findings from a new study from researchers at Princeton University. The study, published online in the journal Pharmacology,
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A new study from researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington suggests that four preventable risk factors—high blood pressure, smoking, high blood sugar and overweight/obesity—are significantly reducing life expectancy across the U.S. In the new
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A natural fiber found in seaweed may reduce the body’s fat absorption by as much as 75%, according to findings presented this past weekend at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco. As part of a three-year research project funded by the U.K.’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council researchers Iain
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In 1897, in a book on suicide, French sociologist Emile Durkheim suggested that being a parent made people less likely to take their own lives. And in the time since, a few studies have explored this hypothesis, consistently finding that women who had children were less likely to take their own lives, and that the more children a woman
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Infections acquired in the hospital can be a dangerous and even deadly problem for patients, yet establishing effective ways to systematically minimize exposure to harmful pathogens is a persistent problem for medical institutions. In fact, a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that roughly half of all
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More medical students applied for residency programs in primary care this year than last, but the future need for general practitioners still far outpaces the number of doctors opting for careers in primary care. According to data from the 2010 report from the National Residency Matching Program—the system that pairs up graduating
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A large scale study of children between the ages of 2 to 19 finds that a growing number of young children are extremely obese—or have a body mass index greater than 35 kg/m. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children who are in the 85th up to 95th percentile (or have a BMI higher than 25 kg/m,
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The BBC News Magazine reports this week on a growing trend of people relying on convenience foods such as pre-chopped carrots and onions, instead of buying the raw ingredients and doing the prep work themselves. As writer Finlo Rohrer reports, popular U.K. supermarket chain Waitrose released figures showing a 40% increase in the last
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