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Magnesium is one of the most important minerals we have. There are many reasons for that. You may know that magnesium is important for bone formation and that severe deficiencies can cause muscle cramps. What may not be so well known is that magnesium is also important for the cardiovascular...

Numerous studies have been conducted on vitamin D and the benefits it provides. This particular study investigated the association between vitamin D and the metabolic syndrome (Devaraj S, et al. 2010). The metabolic syndrome is a condition which includes elevated blood sugar, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides and also often elevated...

We would all like to improve our memory or at least not see it decline as we get older. The following research may show us one way to do that. The study included healthy individuals aged 55 years or more (Yurko-Mauro, et al. 2010). The participants were randomly assigned to...

  White rice is a common food especially in Asia, but also in the USA. It is very common to have white rice served in restaurants. Refined carbohydrates have been suggested to have a negative impact on the glucose metabolism. For that reason a large study involving 25,666 men and...

I   t has been known for a long time that omega 3 fatty acids, the kind you find in fish and flax seeds, have the ability to reduce inflammation. A recent study where the participants were young women between 18-23 years provides even more evidence (Murakami K, et al,...

We all know that exercise is a necessity if we are going to stay healthy. It needs to be part of a healthy lifestyle. Not everybody enjoys spending a lot of time in the gym however. For those who would rather exercise for a short time when they do, the...

  Getting enough sleep on a regular basis seems to be one of many steps you can take to help stay healthy. In a recent study the researchers checked the blood of the participants for an important inflammatory factor called NF-kappaB which has shown to be linked to diabetes, cardiovascular...

  If you have children the results of a new study just published should be of interest to you. This was a large study that included 205,487 children aged 6-7 years old from 73 centers in 31 countries (Beasley R, et al, 2008). The researchers investigated the association between the...

If you do, try green tea! It is probably the healthiest hot beverage you can drink. Green tea and especially a constituent of green tea, called epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) has shown to inhibit cancer growth (Zhang XD, et al. 2008, Ahn WS. et al. 2003). You may have heard that the...

  Being happy is not only good for yourself, but can affect more people than you may think. An interesting study recently published in the British Medical Journal investigated whether happiness can spread from person to person and how it may form within social networks (Fowler JH, Christakis NA, 2008)....

  Recent published research shows interesting connection between exercise and appetite (Broom DR, et al. 2008). Two types of exercise regimes were evaluated for their effect on hunger and levels of the gut hormones acylated ghrelin and peptide YY. 90 minutes of weight training using free weights were compared with...

  It has just been in the news that vitamin C and E did not protect against cancer, referring to an article appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Gaziano JM, et al, 2008). The study included 14,691 participants including 1,307 men with a history of prior cancer...

There are two types of diabetes, type I and type II. Type I diabetes is an autoimmune disease where not enough insulin is produced. While type I diabetes can occur in adult life it is much more common to be born with this condition. Since the pancreas of people with...

  Non-fasting triglycerides mean the fat that is transported by your blood throughout the day. It has been common practice for many years to test the fasting level of triglycerides together with cholesterol. It is less common however to test the triglyceride levels during the day when we have been eating because...

Vitamin D has been found to be important for numerous reasons. In a recent study it was also documented that women who had a higher blood level of 25 hydroxyvitamin D lost more body fat when compared with women with a lower 25 hydroxyvitamin D level (Ortega RM, et al,...

We have all heard that excessive stress is unhealthy. The research referred to here investigated the association between cortisol response and a marker of sub-clinical coronary atherosclerosis (Hamer M., et al., 2009). Cortisol is a stress hormone. The participants were exposed to mental stress through certain tasks. Coronary artery calcification...

Secretory IgA (sIgA) is a mucosal Immunoglobulin and our first line of defense against invading microbes. It is found in mucus and secretions both from the intestine and lining of the lungs. It is interesting that recent research has shown that support of the friendly bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract,...