While some of the staples of eating healthy are pretty easy to remember—eating balanced meals that include veggies, protein and starch, and eating lots of fiber, not too much sugar and not too much fat—sometimes keeping track of all of the little ways that diet can influence our health can be a challenge. Yet, if there’s one thing
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A moving public service announcement from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership in the U.K. has quickly become a viral phenomenon—with views in at least 89 countries and a Facebook group of 1,500 members and counting. The “Embrace Life” ad was launched on January 20, and added to YouTube on January 29, where it’s since been seen nearly
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Some 40% of cancers could be prevented with simple lifestyle changes and higher levels of protection from cancer-causing infections, according to experts at the International Union Against Cancer (UICC). Cancer-causing infections are responsible for 22% of deaths in the developing world, and 6% of deaths in the developed world, according
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For patients at very high risk for developing a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia, taking fish oil supplements may be a way to prevent the onset of psychosis, according to a new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Due to the controversial nature of using anti-psychotic drugs as a preventive treatment for
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I don’t particularly enjoy running. On the other hand, I don’t particularly enjoy being overweight and out of shape either, so I do it — usually about three times a week, depending on my work schedule and willpower. But over the years I’ve developed chronic soreness in my knees and lower back, which I attribute at least in …
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a growing problem in the U.S., driven largely by the prevalence of the condition among soldiers and other military personnel returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan. PTSD, which is characterized by feelings of numbness, depression, guilt, vivid nightmares and disrupted sleep, among other
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With the increasing popularity of soccer around the world comes a corresponding uptick in soccer-related injuries. And considering that fútbol fever has grown particularly rapidly among women in recent years—the number of female soccer players grew by 19% between 2000 and 2006, to 26 million players—female futbolistas have been
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Nearly one in ten prescriptions written at hospitals may contain errors, according to research conducted by the U.K.’s General Medical Council (GMC). In a study of nearly 125,000 prescriptions written over seven days at 19 different hospitals throughout northwest England, researchers found that more than 11,000—or nearly 9%—contained
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Preliminary research presented this week at the Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research conference in Houston, reveals promising findings about the role that exercise and coffee could play in the fight against prostate cancer. An analysis of activity levels among 2,686 prostate cancer patients showed that men who jogged, played tennis or
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Childhood obesity rates are through the roof. In the past 30 years, the percentage of overweight kids has nearly tripled in every age group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Obesity in children is defined as a body mass index, BMI, at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex.) The …
Around 1.5 million preventable medication errors occur in the American health system each year at a cost of over $4 billion annually, according to a new report released yesterday by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The report’s release marks the start of a new effort to reduce those numbers.
The FDA’s “Safe Use” …
A long-held view among HIV researchers is that overlapping multiple sexual partners (aka concurrency) fuels the spread of HIV in Africa. But the authors of a new paper published in the journal AIDS and Behavior are questioning the strength of the supporting evidence. “This theory, which we accept as fact, is really just the strong …
For two decades, the public-health message has been that cancer screening saves lives. In some cases, especially with cancers of the cervix and colon, screening does, in fact, work as it should: sniffing out disease at its earliest and most curable stages. But for breast and prostate cancers—two of the most widespread in the U.S.—the …
