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Both my husband and I dated people who liked to party and stay out all night.  Needless to say, the relationships didn't work out. He and I are both morning people.  And now a new study says it may just be in our DNA. According to newswise.com, the study found that there may be genes in our DNA that can be linked back to someone who is a morning person.   “In this study we set out to discover more about an individual’s preference toward early rising and were able to identify the genetic associations with “morningness” as well as ties to lifestyle patterns and other traits,” says Youna Hu, PhD, who led 23andMe’s research on the paper. The study revolved around a database that yielded genetic insights into a variety of conditions and traits, and potentially how those genetic factors are affected by behavior and environment.   Morningness is governed by differences in circadian rhythm, which have previously been linked to medically relevant traits such as...

Now how's this?  Reading about Donald Trump today can make you fat tomorrow. Well, that's not quite true but it could be.  According to new research , bad news today can influence a country's weight. What’s in the newspaper today can predict how skinny or fat a country’s population will be tomorrow, says new research published in BMC Public Health by Brian Wansink, Professor and Director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, and Brennan Davis, Associate Professor of Marketing from California State University at San Luis Obispo at newswise.com. According to the study, food words trending today will predict a country’s obesity level by 2018 ¬– just three years from now! If you're like me and look forward to Wednesdays and the food section in The New York Times, be very scared.  The study analyzed all the food words mentioned in The Times and The Times of London over the past 50 years and statistically correlated them with each country’s annual Body Mass ...

I have one.  A large waist that is.  And now researchers are saying it's linked to poor health, even for people with good body mass indexes (BMIs), which I don't have, either. In the study, m en and women with large waist circumferences were more likely to die younger, and were more likely to die from illnesses such as heart disease, respiratory problems, and cancer after accounting for body mass index, smoking, alcohol use and physical activity, according to newswise.com.   That means people like me (who are apple-shaped) don't fare as well as those who are pear-shaped. Bummer. Even though I exercise my buns off, apparently that old waist will get me in the end.  It's not like I'm a plus-size but my stomach and waist have always been my weak point.  (Now that I've lost 20 pounds I can't find jeans to fit me, because, to be big enough for my waist, they slide off my hips.) Men with waists 43 inches or greater in circumference had a 50 percent higher...

Hear, hear!  Twelve percent of middle-aged women are satisfied with their bodies, according to a new study . I guess that's better than 0 percent.  But where are all the rest of us? And here's the clincher.  We have to work really, really hard to keep that satisfaction going. "This minority of midlife women who report being satisfied with their body size appears to exert considerable effort to achieve and maintain this satisfaction," reports newswise.com. And we are not immune to "dissatisfaction with other aspects of (our) physical appearance, especially those aspects affected by aging, the Web site quotes Cynthia Bulik, PhD, corresponding author of the study. “Of course the fact that so few women are satisfied with their body size is concerning,” Cristin Runfola, PhD, first author of the study, told newswise.com. “But we were interested in how some women remain happy with their size and shape, given ubiquitous social pressures to retain a youthful thin ap...

Are you ready for this?  A study last year found that eating chocolate twice a week helped participants lower their BMI more than people who didn't. No joke.  CBS News reports that the participants -- 1,000 people free of heart disease, diabetes or cholesterol problems, and average age 57 -- enrolled in a study that measured the effects of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, "but for this study researchers assigned them questionnaires that gauged how often participants chowed down on chocolate." But -- and here's the best part.  Those who ate chocolate two times a week did lower their BMIs but those who ate chocolate more often than that had even smaller BMIs.  Don't believe it?  It's true.  My husband, the dentist, who consumes a pound bag of M&Ms a night, will be happy to hear this. "Even though chocolate can be loaded with calories, it's full of antioxidants and other ingredients that may promote weight loss," CBS News quotes the res...

OK.  You can relax.  It's not your fault if your teen doesn't imitate your fitness routine and is a flabby couch potato. A new study has found that kids just don't seem to care.  I can use my own home as an example.  My husband and I exercise for at least an hour seven days a week, while our son stays glued to the computer.  Thankfully, he's skinny, but his staying so firmly planted in the family room cannot be good for his health. True to our experience, the study found "there was little correlation between teens' fitness levels and whether the teens had one or both parents who regularly engaged in physical activity, researchers said," Ann Lukits at The Wall Street Journal reports. My husband (a former pro) is teaching our son tennis and Phillip does love to kick a soccer ball around the backyard.  But does he swim in the summer like he used to, when he was seven and eight and nine?  No.  Does he ride his bike?  No.  Sadly, the n...

Now I know I must take responsibility for this.  Even though I tried not to, I took being pregnant as license to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.  As a result, I gained 50 pounds (that took nine months to gain and over two years to lose). A new study just out says that women who eat high-fat foods while pregnant may not only produce big babies, but actually change their offsprings' brains in the way they think about food. I'm in the stats for the first part -- my son, who was delivered at 39 weeks because of his size, weighed in at nine pounds (though the doctors, who actually set up a betting pool, were thinking a 10- or 11-pounder), but not the second.  This kid, at 12, doesn't even tip the scales at 80 pounds. The study, done by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, found that "exposure to a high-fat diet in the womb and after birth can permanently change the cells in the brain that ...

I suppose it's a no-brainer but obese people trust overweight physicians over normal-weight physicians on diet advice, according to a new study . Physicians' body mass indexes (BMIs) were measured to determine size.  But interestingly, doctors were on the scales for another reason in the study.  Patients also didn't like going to obese physicians. I can certainly relate to that.  One of my favorite GPs was a doc with a bulging middle, and though I really enjoyed spending time with him (more than five minutes, another fave), I couldn't help thinking how much it could possibly be helping me to see someone with health authority who was, well, fat.  How well was he taking care of himself ? On the other hand, studies have also revealed that many physicians who are normal weight look down their noses at overweight patients.  Studies have found that doctors are nicer to thin people, treating them with the kindness and warmth they don't feel for their heavier pa...