News flash! Feeling fit and fabulous might be a matter of…zip code. To find out which towns make the healthy list, we teamed up with Men's Health in our fourth annual survey of how 100 cities rank in more than 30 categories—from obesity and breast cancer rates to commuting times and hours spent working out. Check out where your city stands, then find out more about the winners.
Ahhhh—it feels heavenly, eases tense muscles, and increases blood flow to the skin (welcome back, rosy glow). But the perks of massage go way deeper than you might think.
One touch. That’s all it takes to get things going. As soon as your skin’s nerve cells sense firm pressure, they shoot a split-second “chill out” signal to the brain, which activates your parasympathetic nervous system. Long name, simple purpose: The system combats stress by essentially hitting a giant reset button for your…
By now you know to avoid a roommate who
" >smokes, lest her carcinogenic cloud take you down. But you might not know to avoid shacking up with a roommate with a
" >snoring problem. Here’s why you should think twice: Recent research shows that a slew of health problems and their side effects can be transferred from one person to another, according to the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity—meaning that friends’ or relatives’ medical issues, or their disregard for their own well-being, can rub off on you! Read on to learn the surprising ways unhealthy behaviors can spread.
Cortisol
Whenever you're in danger—or just really frazzled—your hypothalamus slingshots cortisol, a stress hormone, into your bloodstream. It quickens your heartbeat, feeds your brain extra oxygen, and unleashes energy from your fat and glucose stores—all good things, in a pinch. But studies show unrelenting stress can actually break that initial internal slingshot, leaving you with too little cortisol and making you feel perpetually spent.
Balance It Out: Just three hours a week of cardio or weight training considerably reduces cortisol levels, especially if you keep your workouts short and sweaty. "When you exercise for longer than 40 minutes, your cortisol starts to rise again," says naturopathic physician Natasha Turner, N.D., author of The Hormone Diet. Go for intense, interval-based routines such as alternating jogging and sprinting for 60 seconds each, for 30 minutes total.
Cortisol
Whenever you're in danger—or just really frazzled—your hypothalamus slingshots cortisol, a stress hormone, into your bloodstream. It quickens your heartbeat, feeds your brain extra oxygen, and unleashes energy from your fat and glucose stores—all good things, in a pinch. But studies show unrelenting stress can actually break that initial internal slingshot, leaving you with too little cortisol and making you feel perpetually spent.
Balance It Out: Just three hours a week of cardio or weight training considerably reduces cortisol levels, especially if you keep your workouts short and sweaty. "When you exercise for longer than 40 minutes, your cortisol starts to rise again," says naturopathic physician Natasha Turner, N.D., author of The Hormone Diet. Go for intense, interval-based routines such as alternating jogging and sprinting for 60 seconds each, for 30 minutes total.
To understand how a person can be so desperate for pain relief that they can trick themselves into thinking they've been given an agony-abating medication, it helps to step back in history: In 1772, when smallpox and typhoid fever left thousands of patients in misery (and today's narcotics were a mere fantasy), Scottish physician William Cullen had two seemingly bizarre ideas. The first was that sympathy could cure disease. The second was that an inert substance, like mint water, could relieve pain. Turns out, he was onto something, and his notes mark the birth of the placebo effect, or what happens when an inactive treatment convinces your brain that it's a powerful cure.
I have a confession: I’m a tea junkie. I must remind you, however, that tea is bursting with antioxidants, vitamins, and mineral and has less than half the caffeine (and more than twice the health benefits!) of coffee.
So, yeah. I’m feeling pretty good (and healthy!) about my addiction.
But if you’re like me and can’t remember which tea reduces the chance of lowering cholesterol and which tea wards off diabetes (both are green tea—gotcha!), California Tea House, an awesome online tea house with more than 30 teas, is oh-so helpful. When you are browsing teas on the site, just click on “Health Benefits” and voilà! You know exactly how to make your tea habit work for you.
We’ve all been there: seated next to a snotting, sneezing, coughing person with no escape route available, worried that the next day we’ll be the one hacking. But the truth is, catching an illness can’t always be blamed on the obvious offenders. Though you can pick up germs just about anywhere (disturbingly, viruses can linger on surfaces such as ATMs and checkout-aisle pens for 48 hours), actually coming down with a cold or flu is a complex process—one that you can outsmart by following these stay-healthy tips.
The first females to take the birth-control pill—way back in 1960—were amazed by its life-changing strength (yay, reproductive freedom!). But today’s women don’t give the ultra-common contraceptive much thought. They should: Turns out, the Pill can affect everything from your bones to your brain to, yes, your sex appeal.
The Pill works by tricking your body (via artificial versions of the female hormones estrogen and progesterone) into thinking it has already ovulated. In other words, your ovaries don’t release a monthly egg (sorry, eager-beaver sperm). The process sounds deceptively simple, and it works. But the steady levels of excess hormones floating through your bloodstream are doing much more than pushing the pause button on reproduction.
Americans sure do love their vitamins and supplements. Every year, we spend a whopping $20 billion on them. But if you think all that cash is going to buy you a longer life, think again. A new study in this week’s Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that some supplements may actually shorten your life.
In the study, researchers used information from 40 thousand women who filled in questionnaires several times over the last 22 years. They answered questions about all sorts of health issues, including supplement use.
Matching this data to records from the state health registry and the National Death Index, the researchers identified seven supplements that actually seemed to be hastening death. Those include vitamin B6, folic acid, iron, magnesium, zinc, copper, and even your innocent-looking multivitamin.
Some of them only slightly increased the risk of death during the study period. For example, multivitamins nudged it up by 2.2 percent. However, others were more substantial; copper, for example, increased the risk of death by about 18 percent.
Never one to jump into anything prematurely, the Food and Drug Administration will propose a ban "in the very near future" of bisphenol-A from baby bottles and sippy cups, according to the Bureau of National Affairs.
Bisphenol-A, or BPA, is a plastic-hardening chemical that can have negative effects on "the brain, behavior, and prostate glands in fetuses, infants, and children,” says the National Toxicology Program.
BPA is used in the production of water bottles, sports equipment, medical and dental devices, dental fillings and sealants, eyeglass lenses, CDs and DVDs, and household electronics.
Whatever your particular terror—spiders, slasher flicks, public speaking—your brain follows the same primal instincts. Peer inside the science of fright.
It isn’t just the germaphobes who need to worry about tainted food making its way into our kitchens and onto our plates. Rodale.com sifted through tests from Consumers Union, studies by Consumer Reports, estimates from the Center for Science and Public Interest, and research results from USDA, FDA and CDC to figure out what foods are most likely to be contaminated.
Watch out for these suspect grocery store items the next time you go food shopping:
Chicken
Ground Beef
Ground Turkey
Raw Oysters
Eggs
Cantaloupe
Peaches
Prepackaged Lettuce
Cold Cuts
Sprouts
It seems like no matter our diets, none of us are completely safe from most of the above list. Find out why these foods can be dangerous and what simple steps you can take to avoid food poisoning.
You’ve probably heard that antioxidants do a body good. And you’ve also probably noticed that many of them, like goji or acai berries, can be costly. Luckily for our wallets, new research shows that there are inexpensive alternatives to the more exotic of these disease-fighting, inflammation-calming foods.
Add these seven superfoods to your diet:
1. Black rice 2. Sweet potatoes 3. Apples 4. Certain beans 5. Dried cranberries 6. Coffee 7. Green tea
Find out what these seven antioxidant-rich foods can do for your health. Foods that fight heart disease, cancer, AND make our skin look perfect? Sign us up!
As you nod off…
Drowsiness is brought on by a sleep-promoting chemical called adenosine, which builds up in your body throughout the day. If you skip shut-eye at night, a high level of adenosine can leave you feeling desperate for a nap.
Your brain pumps out GABA, a neurotransmitter that lets your head’s sleep-wake center know it’s sleepy time. GABA also helps deactivate much of the brain stem, which controls muscle movement. That’s why when you dream about, say, playing tennis, you don’t swing your arm.
If you’re super-exhausted, your brain might shut down before your body is fully relaxed, leading to involuntary muscle contractions (those arm or leg jerks).
In the first five minutes…
Your brain isn’t conscious, but your senses are still online. A sharp noise or a poke would rouse you.
As your blood pressure and heart rate slow down, your eyes stop moving behind your lids and will remain sluggish for the rest of your snooze.
Really, who among us has looked at a salmon glistening in the grocery store and wondered, Where did you come from?
If you’ve thought about it at all, you’ve probably assumed it’s a matter of the birds and the bees: Girl fish meets boy fish, they hit it off, and he showers her thousands of eggs with his sperm. A little while later their offspring are hatched, grow to 10 pounds in about three years, and land on our grills.
Now, however, a biotechnology company near Boston wants to change all that. AquaBounty Technologies (ABT), using some snazzy feats of engineering and genetic code manipulations, has developed a fish—called AquAdvantage Salmon—that grows twice as fast as conventional ones. Pending FDA approval, ABT could be the first company in the world to market a genetically engineered animal as food.
Your heart is one impressive, overachieving organ: In the minute it takes you to read these paragraphs, it will have pushed a whopping 1.5 gallons of blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels—that’s more than twice the circumference of Earth. Yet despite your ticker’s superpowers (and the fact that it keeps you, well, alive), most women don’t do enough to safeguard their heart health.
That’s right, we’re talking to you. Heart disease is the number one killer of all women, says health advocate and former U.S. surgeon general Richard Carmona, M.D.
“It can and does affect young people,” he stresses. In other words, it’s not just a problem for geezers. The following are simple lifestyle tweaks that can help you live a long, healthy life.
Running and asthma would seem to be mutually exclusive, but look no further than marathon-world-record holder Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain, who was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma at the age of 14, to see that it’s possible for asthmatics to enjoy—and excel at—a cardio-intensive sport like running.
Bill Roberts, M.D., medical director for the Twin Cities Marathon and a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School in St. Paul, Minnesota, offers these six tips for runners who, like him, suffer from asthma. Follow Roberts’ advice and you can hit the road and still breathe deeply.
