Hot MedFax

Finally I'm doing something right. Experts now claim you'll live longer if you run .  According to newswise.com, a new Iowa State University study found running for just five or 10 minutes a day can significantly reduce your risk of death from cardiovascular disease. I run two to three miles a day.  Does that mean I'll live forever? Seriously, though, DC (Duck-chul) Lee, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of kinesiology at Iowa State, says runners were 45 percent less likely to die from heart disease or stroke than non-runners. Researchers followed more than 55,000 adults for 15 years to gauge the benefits of running, newswise reports. Lee says runners reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease regardless of distance, duration and speed. Which is good.  Because I barely run a 10-minute mile (although it used to be a 15-!). “Most people say they don’t have time to exercise or to increase their physical activity, but I think most everyon...

All of you guys out there on the fence -- get married.  I know, I know, I'm with a man who waited 10-and-a- half years to do it.  But if you believe all the studies, you'll live longer.  And now you're less likely to get cardiac disease (I guess that makes sense) as well. According to newswise.com, " Analysis of surveys of more than 3.5 million American men and women, administered at some 20,000 health centers across the country — believed to be the largest analysis of its kind ever performed — found that married people, regardless of age, sex, or even cardiovascular risk factors, had significantly less chances of having any kind of cardiovascular disease than those who were single, divorced or widowed." The study went even further.  newswise.com reports it found:  Being married carried a 5 percent lower risk of having any cardiovascular disease than being single   Widowed and divorced people were, respectively, 3 percent and 5 percent, more ...

It seems hard to believe (and sad), but maybe not so when I look at my couch-potato, computer-nerd son: our kids are less fit than we were when we were young. Remember running around your neighbors' yards with your friends, hiking in the woods behind your house, chasing the dog, and, in my neighborhood in the summer, not having to come home until you heard the fire station foghorn, marking 8 p.m.? Today's kids don't seem to have those kinds of pleasures.  Just about every play date when my son was little involved a car, and our busy road is too dangerous to ride a bike.  Sometimes we take a walk in nice weather but that's about all he really wants to do that's physical. (Of course, when a close friend lived nearby, they played soccer endlessly, but then Michael moved away.) A new study has found that, around the world, children don't run as fast or as far as their parents did when they were kids, and today's kids are about 15% less aerobically fit t...

Now this is the best thing yet.  We've all heard how exercise and doing crossword puzzles and eating walnuts (or peanuts or whatever nut it was) will keep our brains healthy into old age.  But guess what the experts are saying now?  Chocolate. How did we get so lucky?  A new study  just out says drinking two cups of hot chocolate a day may help older people "keep their brains healthy and their thinking skills sharp," according to a story at newswise.com. The study looked at 60 people with an average age of 73 who did not have dementia.  The participants drank two cups of hot cocoa per day for 30 days and did not consume any other chocolate during the study, newswise.com reports. Participants were then given tests of memory and thinking skills. They also had ultrasounds tests to measure the amount of blood flow to the brain during the tests. Blood flow in the brain is very important. Different areas of the brain need more energy to complete tasks a...