Here’s another reason to fret over a flabby stomach. A new study suggests that adults who aren’t technically overweight but have a lot of fat around their guts run a higher death risk than people who are obese. Conducted by researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., the study looked at people with normal body mass index scores who also fit the definition for “central obesity” — meaning they had a high waist-to-hip ratio. Normal-weight patients with a lot of belly fat, it turned out, had the highest death risks from cardiovascular disease and other causes, according to a […]

Author Jonathon Goldstein once said, “Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast because eating breakfast, even if it’s 5 o’clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in the towel.” Maybe for many of us breakfast represents that “new day dawning” attitude, but is there really something more to it — physiologically speaking? There’s no doubt that one of the most popular statements ever made in nutrition and medicine is that breakfast is the most important meal of […]

Initial results from a scientific study on water consumption and cellular dehydration conducted at the Murad Research Labs in El Segundo, California, have uncovered surprising results, dramatically challenging and debunking the ages-old notion that everyone should drink “eight glasses of water per day.” In an ongoing effort to gather and analyze data pertaining to healthy living, researchers at the Murad Research Labs, directed by Howard Murad, M.D., FAAD, measured the intracellular water levels of 104 women, revealing that those who regularly drink 7-8 cups of water per day actually have a lower average intracellular water level than those subjects who […]

An article published online ahead of print on June 25, 2012 in the Journal of Women’s Health reports the finding of researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Oregon of increased weight gain in women with vitamin D insufficiency. The study included 4,659 women aged 65 and older enrolled in the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures, a prospective, multicenter study. Serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels were assessed upon enrollment and in a subset of participants at follow-up. Seventy-eight percent of the subjects were found to have insufficient levels of the vitamin at 30 nanograms per milliliter or lower. Over the 4.5 […]