Congratulations gentlemen, all your efforts of living a healthier lifestyle are starting to pay off. According to a report from Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the life expectancy for U.S. males grew by 4.6 years.

This increase has narrowed the gender gap from seven years back in 1989 down to five years, one month and six days. This means that today’s men will live to be an average age of 76.2, while a woman’s average lifespan (which rose by 2.7 years) will be 81.3.

Dr. Ali Mokdad, professor of global health at the IHME, part of the University of Washington, told MSNBC one of the reasons they may be catching up is because when it comes to cardiovascular disease, “men are tending to be more vigilant than women.”

When it comes to cardiovascular disease, it is the number one killer for women. It is often unrecognized and untreated in women, according to the American Heart Association. Mokdad told MSNBC, “In this country, we haven’t done a good  job of raising awareness for women about the risk factors for cardiovascular disease.”
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If you mention weight loss it seems a million “tips” or “pieces of advice” come flying out of the woodwork. There’s many of them out there like, “Don’t eat after such and such time,” “Stop eating bread and carbs,” or “Eat eight tiny meals a day.” Most of this can be overturned and found to be another empty promise of how to lose weight. One myth that seems to be pushed is about how water has the power to flush out fat from the body. Sadly, it seems this may be just another myth.

The myth is often stated that, “drinking eight glasses of water a day flushes out fat.” Truth is, that’s simply not true.

“…There’s no magic about drinking water,” says Sue Gebo, RD, MPH, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.

Gebo explains that water cannot flush away fat, that is just a hopeful myth. While water can not perform this trick, a Virginia Tech University study explains how this myth may have started.

The study found that people who drank 16 ounces of water prior to eating a meal actually consumed 75 to 95 fewer calories than the control group. Both groups in the study were on prescribed low-calorie diets and on average the water drinkers lost more weight, 4.5 pounds more than the non-water drinkers.
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In the world of health, fitness and weight loss, there seem to be a large number of studies constantly conducted to help us figure out how to fight obesity and get healthy. Recently, another study with important outcomes has published with some drastic results.

Identified as a way to have your cake and eat it too, this study shows that eating your last meal of the day earlier, and then fasting for a 16 hour stretch before eating breakfast, can decrease the risk of weight gain and decrease the onset of weight related diseases. The study was headed by regulatory biologist Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute in California. and was done on mice. He made the statement, “We have to come up with something that is a simple alternative to calorie counting.” The results of the study were published in the journal Cell Metabolism. Within the study, the participating mice were divided into groups and had a regulated diet for a total of 100 days.
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When coffee is in the headlines, I tend to shield my eyes. I don’t want to hear why one of my dearest pleasures in life is potentially bad for me. And if you’re a coffee drinker, I imagine you feel the same.

Well, take heart fellow java lovers, because today’s news will inspire you to drink up! A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is suggesting that coffee may be linked to a longer life.

The AARP joined researchers from the National Institute of Health to conduct a very long study regarding coffee consumption. The study lasted 13 years, to be exact. And during that time, researchers followed more than 400,000 healthy men and women between the ages of 50 and 71. In the time frame of 13 years, 13 percent of the participants died.

The research concluded that overall, coffee drinkers were less likely than their peers to die throughout the study. Also, the more coffee the individuals drank, the lower their mortality risk seemed to be. This is compared to those in the study who drank no coffee at all. The male coffee drinkers who drank more than six cups of coffee a day were 10 percent less likely to die during the study; while the females with the same consumption were 15 percent less likely to die during the study.
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It looks like the soft drink industry and other sugar-laden product companies are going to take another hit in the name of fructose.

A recent study on fructose’s effects on rats showed that when fed water laced with fructose for a period of six weeks, the rats’ performance in maze navigation was slower.

This experiment was conducted by researchers at UCLA, and the results concluded that the brain is responding to insulin from the fructose consumed by the rats. The senior author of the study is UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, and the findings were published in the Journal of Physiology.

Of the study, Gomez-Pinilla said, “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. We’re concerned about high-fructose corn syrup, which is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative.” Gomez-Pinilla specified that this study is not just about high-fructose corn syrup, though. He mentioned that all sugar, including table sugar, juices and any form of added sugar should be avoided. Studies like this have repeatedly shown that the sugar contributes to instances of obesity, diabetes and blood-fat disturbances in rodents.
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