For those in developed countries, extending life expectancy can be mostly an issue of tuning lifestyle according to the latest report from the World Health Organization that takes a long hard look at preventable death. Their findings are that relatively few factors are having a tremendous impact on human health and life expectancy world wide. Nearly all of them are readily modifiable. Read the rest of this entry »

An ongoing study of thousands of nurses has now released data on the 17,000+ women now over 70 years old. The results: “Women who were obese at age 50 were 79% less likely than women with a normal BMI at that age to be healthy survivors.” The criteria for “healthy survivors” is that they did not have cancer, diabetes, heart attacks, coronary bypass, congestive heart failure, strokes, kidney disease, and a host of other maladies. Moreover, those who gained weight between the ages of  18 and 50 were less likely to be healthy than those with a steady weight. Read the rest of this entry »

Today isn’t the actual anniversary of the event but close enough. On September 26, 1914, something seeming mundane happened. A baby was born to a family of French immigrants living in San Francisco. What actually happened was more auspicious. That baby was Jack Lalanne who over the weekend celebrated his 95th birthday. Read the rest of this entry »

Every day, somewhere in the world, there is scientific research on health and medicine being published. And that research is in turn summarized and reported by the media. Regrettably, much of that research or its media coverage is misinterpreted or conflicting or even misleading. When the news reports that something is good for you one day, and the next week reports that the same thing is bad for you, it’s easy to give up altogether. Thankfully, Dr. Alicia White has thought about these issues and brings several tips to interpret the latest health and medical news.

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While many people only get about 6 hours of sleep a day, it turns out that’s only really the right amount of sleep for only 3-5% of us. Not getting enough sleep has been linked to such diverse bad effects as more car accidents, bad short term memory, depression, and an inability to control the appetite. Not enough sleep can even cause cancer and endocrine problems. Certainly this is a list of issues everyone would like to avoid.

A new study shows that some of the 3-5% of us who really can make do with less sleep have a mutation in a gene called DEC2, which regulates our internal clocks. While some scientists would like to use this research to eventually develop sleep in pill form, the rest of us will have to work on getting more of the real thing.