Today's NewsBites

Do pregnant women participating in the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program have healthier babies? A study of the nationwide spread of WIC since 1974 finds that pre-natal WIC nutritional assistance is associated with a significant increase in babies’ birth weight—important in its own right and as a predictor of later health. …

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Watching your waistline just got serious. Although being fatter around the middle has previously been linked to greater risk of chronic disease, a large new study links extra abdominal circumference to increased risk of death — even if you're not otherwise overweight. Researchers studied data on 48,500 men and 56,343 women ages 50 and older over a nine-year period. Even after adjusting for body mass index (BMI), the standard measure for overweight and obesity, very large waists (47" or larger in men, 42" or larger in women) were associated with roughly double the risk of dying. But having a larger waistline was also linked to greater mortality risk across all BMI levels, including normal-weight men and women. For normal-BMI men, each additional 10 cm (3.9") of waistline boosted the likelihood of dying by 16% compared to men with bigger BMIs but svelter waists; for normal-weight women, an extra 10 cm increased risk 25%. Scientists noted that waist circumference is strongly correlated with fat tissue surrounding the organs in the abdomen, which is thought to be more dangerous than fat under the skin. Future health guidelines, they added, may need to focus more on waistlines. — Archives of Internal Medicine…

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Current Articles

In light of a recent review questioning the link between saturated-fat intake and heart disease (May 2010 Healthlet-ter), another new meta-analysis suggests the key to heart health may be what you eat instead of saturated fats. If you replace saturated fats such as butter with processed carbohy-drates, you may be no better off. But replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats such as those in liquid vegetable oils reduced the risk of a coronary heart disease-related event by 19%.…

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Vitamin D’s important role in bone health, already linked to protection against osteoporosis, may extend to joints and prevention of the most common form of arthritis. A new study reports that men with insufficient vitamin D levels were twice as likely to have hip osteoarthritis as those with normal vitamin D.…

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Science suddenly seems to have a java jones. Four new studies focus on America’s favorite morning brew, adding to the overflowing cup of research linking coffee consumption to health benefits.…

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Ask Tufts Experts

 

I’ve noticed that some cereals contain freezedried fruit. How does freeze-dried compare to fresh fruit in terms of nutrition?

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After getting so many different answers, can you please tell me how bad is aspartame? I like chewing gum sweetened with it—two or three pieces a day— and people tell me I should cut down because aspartame is bad.

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I bake some favorite desserts and recently switched to wholewheat pastry flour. Is whole-wheat pastry flour as nutritious as regular wholewheat flour?

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High-protein diets make kidneys work harder—an issue for the more than 20 million Americans who have chronic kidney disease but don’t know it.

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