Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.

For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.

Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands. Read more »

Use of medicines to prevent disease may not prolong or improve life in elderly people, say doctors.

Drugs such as statins, prescribed to combat heart disease, may simply switch the cause of death to cancer or dementia in older people, they warn.

Writing in the British Medical Journal they said fear of discrimination meant doctors were offering preventive treatment regardless of age.

Experts agreed more evidence on such treatments in the elderly was needed.

Statins are the mainstay of the government’s goal to cut rates of heart disease by 40% by 2010. Click here for full article

A rapid rise in potentially avoidable cancers linked to “lifestyle factors” such as alcohol, smoking, obesity and exposure to the sun, has been detected by researchers.

A new study, published today by Cancer Research UK, shows that rates of melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer, have risen by more than 40% in the past decade. Cases of mouth, womb, and kidney cancers have also increased rapidly in the past 10 years. Research has shown that around half of all cases of cancer diagnosed in the UK could be prevented by simple changes in lifestyle.

Lucy Morrish, statistical information manager at Cancer Research UK, who compiled the figures, said: “While incidence rates for some cancers have fallen over the past decade, others are rising and many of these cases could be prevented if people avoided excessive sun exposure, smoking and obesity and limited their alcohol intake.” Click here for full article

Adults who had so-called metabolic syndrome when they were children have a substantially increased risk of having heart disease in their 30s, researchers report.

The metabolic syndrome is a cluster of risk factors — such as high blood pressure, obesity and high blood sugar levels — that together increase the likelihood of developing heart problems or diabetes.

Individual components of metabolic syndrome are known to track from childhood into adulthood, but the association between metabolic syndrome in childhood and cardiovascular risk later in life has not been established, Dr. John A. Morrison and his associates explain in the medical journal Pediatrics.

The researchers analyzed data, collected between 1973 and 1976, on levels of blood glucose, triglycerides, “good” cholesterol, body weight, and blood pressure in 771 children aged 5 to 19 years. Click here for full article

Children as young as eight should be given the cholesterol-lowering drugs statins to reduce their risk of heart disease, say doctors.

A week after the Government’s heart adviser caused controversy by suggesting every man over 50 and every woman over 60 should take a daily statin, researchers in the Netherlands recommend that the medication should be offered to children at high risk.

But unlike Professor Roger Boyle, who argued that a blanket approach to treatment of heart disease in middle age would be the most effective strategy, the Dutch researchers do not suggest handing out statins so freely.

They recommend the treatment only for those children with a genetic condition called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), which causes very high levels of low density lipoprotein cholesterol, commonly called “bad” cholesterol, from birth onwards. Click here for full article

It has thousands of devotees, but can cider vinegar really cure arthritis?

Sarah Gall, a church organist from Rochdale, Lancashire, believes that she has been cured of arthritis in her spine by following a diet that included apple cider vinegar and honey.

The use of cider vinegar follows in a long tradition: people have been using natural cider vinegar as a medicine for centuries.

As far back as 3,000 BC, Egyptians were using it for health benefits including weight loss. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, was said to have used cider vinegar for its healing qualities.

While doctors remain sceptical, many sufferers have embraced it, including the explorer and adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Click here for full article

Latest figures show over a fifth of UK men and women are obese and 2.9% of women and 1% of men are obese to the point that it threatens their health. However, it’s not just in the UK that overweight or obese people are causing concerns to their health.

Reuters reports that more than two-thirds of Australians living outside major cities are overweight or obese, and extremely obese corpses are creating a safety hazard at mortuaries.

Nearly three quarters of men and 64 percent of women were overweight in a study of people in rural areas. Just 30 percent of those studied recorded a healthy weight, said research published in the Medical Journal of Australia.
Click here for full article

Women in their 40s are more likely to drink potentially harmful amounts on a night out than younger people, researchers in Cardiff have found.

While men’s drinking peaked in their late 20s, women’s alcohol intake reached its heights among the over-40s.

In a year, 893 people were breathalysed late at night in the city centre for the Cardiff University study. It found 40% of men and 20% of women had drunk over a level which put them more at risk of injury and ill-health. Click here for full article

A survey of young people in their early thirties has found those in high-stress jobs run twice the risk of suffering serious depression or anxiety as those in lower-stress occupations.

Top of the stress league are men who are head chefs in big restaurants and construction workers under pressure to complete a building on time. They are six times more likely to buckle under stress, researchers report. Click here for full article

Experts confirm what we at Fitness-etc already knew. Using the Body Mass Index (BMI) to monitor changes in your body composition is “outdated and flawed”. In addition, using a formula or height/weight chart to determine your “ideal weight” can be misleading. They do not take into consideration your lifestyle, health issues, body composition, metabolism, or ethnic background.

For more than 100 years a healthy weight has been defined by calculating a persons BMI. Using height and weight measurements, a person is categorised as underweight, normal, overweight or obese. Click here for full article