Here are some finds:

- in 1950, the median age for first marriages was 20 for women and 23 for men.
- in 2009, the median age for first marriages was 26 for women and 28 for men.

- in 1996, about 40 percent of women 40 to 49 had divorced.
- in 2009, about 35 percent of women 40 to 49 had divorced.

- in 2009, almost 50% of people interviewed had only been married once, 12% had been married twice and 3% had been married three or more times.

- in 2009, regarding first marriages: they lasted a median of 8 years before ending in divorce.
- in 2009, regarding second marriages: the median age was 33 for women and 36 for men.

Live-In Girlfriends Unhappier, Have Lower Self-Esteem Than Wives? [STUDY]

80% Of Singles Disapprove Of Sex On The First Date; Do You? [SURVEY]

African-American Women Have Killer Confidence
African-American women were three times as likely as Caucasian women to rate themselves at the hot end of the spectrum.

Women Are Conflicted About Curves
73% percent of women say that a curvier body type is more appealing now than it has been in the past ten years. However, 85% still wanted their hips to be narrower.

Aging Isn’t Acceptable?
93% percent of women say the pressure to look young today is greater than it’s ever been.

The Most Stressed-About Body Part
35% percent of men and women said that, if there is one part of their bodies they’d like to change the most, it’s their stomachs.

Even Guys Worry About Weight
97% of women said that they wanted to weigh less—but so did 86% percent of men. Read more results HERE!

Check Out Fitness Tips To Keep Your Body Fit Like The Celebs:

Women Waiting Longer To Marry, Divorce Rate Drops [REPORT]

Live-In Girlfriends Unhappier, Have Lower Self-Esteem Than Wives? [REPORT]

Well, it turns out that we should be focusing on improving our smile rather than spending unnecessary hours fussing about a new dress, as a survey conducted by the British Dental Health Foundation has found that a smile is the second most important feature that people assess when determining attractiveness.

Female First noted that a smile was rated as the most important feature by 56% of respondents, closely followed by faces at 53% and eyes, 51%. Dress sense, body shape, hair and height were also measured, with the latter bringing up the rear on 25%.

Interestingly, it was a non-physical attribute – personality – which was the clear winner of the survey, with 90% of respondents rating this human attribute most important when it comes to attraction. These results are reiterated in another similar survey conducted by Allure Magazine, which also found that women are more attracted to a man’s face and smile than to his height or body type.

The Chief Executive of the British Dental Health Foundation, Dr. Nigel Carter, explained why we love a smile: “The survey is a great reminder that we should be giving greater attention to our teeth… because it gives us the confidence to smile, which makes a major difference to our relationships, careers and overall image.”

He continues to say: ‘It takes 43 muscles to frown, yet it only takes 17 to smile. A simple smile can make others feel at ease around you and can be a powerful show of emotion, yet not everyone has the confidence to do so… The results of the survey show even though many of us aren’t happy with our teeth and do avoid smiling because of their appearance, we’re still attracted to the opposite sex by a simple smile.”

So there you go, it turns out, all it really does take is a smile! To steal a line from Mother Teresa: “We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.”

Do you agree?

The Best Perfume To Arouse Men

Is It Really In The Eyes? Body Language Decoded.

SURVEY: 80% Of Singles Disapprove Of Sex On The First Date; Do You?

Here’s what The Telegraph had to say:

“The study of 22,000 people from around the world found that British women who cohabited with men before they were married were slightly unhappier than married women, and that the most likely reason was because they had “violated” normal behavior and had to endure disapproving glances.

The researchers also claimed that one of the possible reasons they were unhappy was because they were “pitied” for failing to persuade their man down the aisle, and they had low self-esteem.

Countries with a strong, traditional view of marriages, such as America, Bulgaria, Brazil and Mexico were places where the correlation between cohabiting and unhappiness was strongest. Women in places with a relaxed outlook, such as Netherlands and Scandinavian countries were equally happy if they were married or cohabiting.”

Do you agree with these results?

SURVEY: 80% Of Singles Disapprove Of Sex On The First Date; Do You?

STUDY: One-Third Snoop Through Mates Email & Phones

Bailout Plan
31% of both men and women agree that 15 minutes into the date is long enough to tell if there is chemistry. However, only 12% would leave within the first 30 minutes of a date if it isn’t going as planned.

Too Fast on a First Date?
Only 6.5% of singles claim they have frequently had sex on the first date, while 80% of singles disapprove of ending the date between the sheets.

Making the Call
48% of women prefer men to make the follow-up call after the first date. A majority of men (68%) will pick up the phone between one to three days after the date, while 6% of men can’t resist following up within the first 24 hours.

Meet the Guys
Men (50%) are more likely to introduce someone they’re interested in to their friends within the first month of dating than women are (35%).

Read more here!

Survey Says That Mixed Races Are Most Beautiful

STUDY: One-Third Snoop Through Mates Email & Phones

In addition, the issue disclosed that women own an average of 17 pairs of shoes (down from 19 four years ago) yet only typically wear three of those pairs on a regular basis. Read more here!

Women More Likely To Buy If Model Reflects Their Age, Size, Race [REPORT]

Black Women Happier With, Less Likely To Change Body Than White Women [REPORT]

How much do YOU spend on shoes?

Ben Barry, a PhD student at Cambridge University, used fake ads when he surveyed 3,000 women in the UK, US and Canada, “and the vast majority of women significantly increase purchase intentions when they see a model that reflects their age, size and race.”

Unfortunately, as we all know, and Barry himself said, the “industry operates in its own bubble.”

His advice? “Advertisers and magazine editors need to be mindful of who their target market is and how the models reflect that market, catch up and change.”

But Barry’s hopeful. He believes companies will make the change once they start to see the economic benefits of using a more diverse range of women to sell their products. SOURCE

We’ve got our fingers crossed.

25 Reasons We Love Blaxploitation Films

47 Things You Don’t Know About Michelle Obama

Black Women Happier With, Less Likely To Change Body Than White Women [REPORT]

Young Women Preferring Curvy Bodies Over Thin [REPORT]

A study commissioned by online gadget review site Retrevo.com found that 38 percent of people under age 25 had stolen a glance at their lover’s texts or e-mails – without that person’s permission or awareness. Among married adults of any age, the rate was 36 percent.

READ MORE OF THIS STORY HERE.

Have you ever sneaked a peek at your partner’s email or texts? Tell us if you have.

Should You Put Your Own Ring On It?

Does money make or break a relationship?

The BBC has reported that the elusive erogenous zone said to exist in some women may be a myth, according to researchers who have “hunted” for it.

Their study is the biggest yet, involving 1,800 women, and it found no proof.  The King’s College London team believe the G-spot may be a figment of women’s imagination, encouraged by magazines and sex therapists.

But sexologist Beverley Whipple, who helped popularize the G-spot idea, said the work was “flawed,” claiming researchers had discounted the experiences of lesbian or bisexual women and failed to consider the effects of having different sexual partners with different love-making techniques.

Woman Suffers From 24/7 Sexual Arousal

The women in the study, who were all pairs of identical and non-identical twins, were asked whether they had a G-spot. If one did exist, it would be expected that both, who have the same genes, would report having one. But this pattern did not emerge.

Dr. Petra Boynton, a sexual psychologist at University College London, said: “It’s fine to go looking for the G-spot but do not worry if you don’t find it. It should not be the only focus. Everyone is different.”

The Gräfenberg Spot, or G-Spot, was named in honour of the German gynaecologist Ernst Gräfenberg who described it over 50 years ago. It is said to sit in the front wall of the vagina some 2-5cm up.

Read why the G-Spot DOES exist here

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

WTF? Carrying 3 Condoms Makes Me Prostitute?

Think lung cancer is an equal-opportunity ailment? Not so, says a new study.

[From Daily Mail]

Women are more vulnerable to the deadly side effects of smoking than men, a lung cancer study found.

Research into patients with the disease found women tended to be diagnosed at a younger age than men – even though they had smoked fewer cigarettes.

Smoking teens at a higher risk for Multiple Sclerosis

They were also more likely to develop one of the most common forms of the cancer, researchers said.

It adds to the growing pile of evidence suggesting that women are more vulnerable to the cancer-causing chemicals, or carcinogens, in tobacco than men.

The study looked at 683 lung cancer patients treated at a Swiss clinic between 2000 and 2005. It found that female smokers were statistically most likely to develop adenocarcinoma – a common form of lung cancer – and were more likely to be diagnosed with the disease at an earlier age.

Study leader Dr Martin Frueh, from St Gallen Canton Hospital in Switzerland, said: ‘Our findings suggest that women may have an increased susceptibility to tobacco carcinogens.’

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Loneliness is just as bad as smoking, say doctors

Chewing gum is banned in most schools, but new research is showing that it might actually HELP you or your kids do better during crunch time! Read the article below.

[From CNN Health]

If you’re looking to curb your appetite and improve your memory, you’re probably exercising, eating healthier foods and trying to get some sleep.

Those things are all good, but maybe you should try chomping on a stick of sugar-free gum.

At least that’s what research funded by the Wrigley Science Institute and being presented at the Experimental Biology 2009 meeting this week may have you think. The data are part of a growing body of research that is giving Americans more reasons to pop some gum in their mouths and chew away.

One line of research suggests that gum should no longer be treated as contraband in schools. This newest study indicates that chewing gum can lead to better academic performance.

Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine took 108 eighth-grade math students from a Houston, Texas, charter school and divided them into two groups, following them for 14 weeks. One group chewed gum while doing homework and during test-taking situations. The other group did not chew gum at all.

The results were surprising. The gum-chewing students had a 3 percent increase in their standardized math test scores compared with those who did not chew gum. Also, the students who chewed gum had better final grades compared with the non-chompers.

“Chewing gum is an easy tool students can use for a potential academic edge,” says Craig Johnston, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an instructor in nutrition at the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine.

He also reports that teachers anecdotally found that students who chewed gum required fewer breaks, paid better attention and stayed quiet longer than those who did not.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Chewing gum is just one of 10 great alternatives to snacking, and here are 7 foods you should not ignore.

A new study claims that sad parents are more likely to give their kids bad food. Does this sound far-fetched, or right up your alley?

[From Science Daily]

Mothers with many negative thoughts and feelings are more likely to give their children unhealthy food. This is shown in a study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) in collaboration with the University of Oslo.

This is the first research project in the world that analyses children’s diets combined with both psychological and sociodemographic variables in the mother. As part of the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study, a total of 27,763 mothers were asked how often and how much their 18 month old child ate of 36 types of food and drink. By this age, children learn to prefer sweet and fatty food over healthy food.

“We found that mothers who were emotionally unstable, anxious, angry, sad, had poor self-confidence or a negative view of the world were far more likely to give their child sweet and fatty foods. At the same time, there was no link between maternal personality and how healthy a diet the child got in the form of fruit and vegetables,” explains psychologist Eivind Ystrøm at the NIPH.

These maternal personality traits fall under a collective name of high negative affectivity (negative emotions). These people often have a lower stress threshold, giving up quicker when faced with obstacles – e.g. in a disagreement – and often experience lack of control of the child.

“I think that mothers compensate for this either by trying to force healthy food into their child or hold the sweet-bag strings extra tightly,” Ystrøm continues. “Paradoxically, they try to balance poor control by actually using more control. With force and restrictions they increase desire which quickly results in resistance in the form of tantrums which these mothers are also bad at resisting. Also, earlier studies have shown that controlling behaviour among parents is linked with a more sugar-rich diet among children.”

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Are you the key to your kid’s healthy weight?

What’s more important when it comes to your kids: athletics or academics?

Putting on your makeup in the car is a total NO-NO, but a new study suggests that women who apply makeup in the morning have better balance and are overall less clumsy, which could therefore cause less accidents on the road! Says Telegraph,

Researchers believe that the time consuming act of slapping on lipstick or applying blusher could serve as a form of stretching exercise, improving people’s balance and co-ordination.

A study led by the research communications director from the cosmetics giant L’Oreal found that older women who applied make-up in the morning stood straighter and had fewer falls than those who did not.

Dr Patricia Pineau, of the University of St Etienne in France, claimed that the findings could help prevent many debilitating accidents.

Her team studied 100 women aged between 65 and 85 as part of a study originally intended to measure the effect of wearing make-up on self esteem.

They were fitted with belts to measure their posture and given special insoles to test their centre of gravity.

The team concluded that those who wore even a small amount of make-up appeared to be more stable on their feet.

“They held themselves differently to those who did not wear make-up,” Dr Pineau was quoted as saying.

While this study is pretty interesting, I honestly can’t say that it’s necessarily true – I’ve been wearing makeup since high school, and I’m just as clumsy and off-balance as I’ve ever been! But maybe I’m an exception. What about you?

There’s a difference between putting on a little makeup in the morning, and putting on a full clown face! It could be a huge turn-off.

When is it time to throw that old makeup out?

[From Time.com]

For decades, heart disease has had the dubious honor of being the leading killer of Americans. Most heart-related deaths happen among the elderly, by far the largest at-risk group for cardiovascular disease. But a new study finds that an alarming portion of heart failure cases are occurring in a much younger group – under age 50 – and overwhelmingly among African Americans.

In the first large-scale study to document the extent of the race gap in heart disease, researchers report that one in 100 black adults develop heart failure in their 30s and 40s – a rate 20 times higher than that of similarly aged white men and women. In fact, the heart failure rate among young black adults was more like that of white men and women in their 50s and 60s. “What these data point out is that it’s important to recognize that disease patterns differ in different populations,” says Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, one of the study’s authors and co-director of the Center for Vulnerable Populations at the University of California, San Francisco, and San Francisco General Hospital. “We would have completely missed this at-risk group had we only been looking at older age groups. We would have also missed them if we had not been studying African Americans in large numbers.”

The new report, published in the March 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, is a large government-funded survey that began in 1985. The aim of the study was to document the frequency of heart disease among young adults, so researchers recruited more than 5,000 volunteers from four cities and tracked them for 20 years, measuring their blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, fasting blood sugar and kidney function. These tests were repeated six times over the two-decade period.

The black adults who developed heart disease early had at least one of four risk factors – high blood pressure, being overweight, chronic kidney disease or low levels of “good” cholesterol (high-density cholesterol, or HDL). Blood pressure and heart risk rose in step: for each 10 mm increase in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number of the ratio), the risk of having heart failure in their 40s doubled. For each 5.7 increase in body mass index (BMI), a ratio of weight and height, the risk of developing heart failure increased by 40%. And each 13.3 mg/dL drop in HDL levels also boosted the risk of heart disease by 40%.

But the largest risk factor for heart failure among this group was chronic kidney disease, a condition that is often triggered by untreated diabetes and obesity. Black adults with chronic kidney disease experienced a stunning 20-fold jump in their risk of heart failure, compared with black adults without kidney disease. “Here we have tangible evidence that heart failure in the young is a real dilemma,” says Dr. Clyde Yancy, president-elect of the American Heart Association.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

THESE make for a good way to keep your blood pressure down!

Heart disease is also the number one killer of African American women. Here are ways to help save your heart!

Unsurprising news alert! A new study shows that listening to songs with sexual lyrics can lead to higher and more risky sexual behavior among teenagers. Says the Canadian Press,

High exposure to lyrics that describe degrading sex is associated with high levels of sexual behaviour in teens, a new study suggests.

The research, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, was conducted in three large urban high schools in the Pittsburgh area, and involved asking Grade 9 students about the number of hours a day they listen to music and their favourite musical artists.

“Music exposure is growing … there is now unprecedented access to music and it’s also becoming more direct, more explicit,” said co-author Dr. Brian Primack of the Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

“Adolescents are exposed to six to eight hours of mass media messages per day, and since it is such an important exposure, we need to know if this is affecting health.”

He noted, for example, that data have shown that up to 25 per cent of American teenage girls have sexually transmitted diseases.

STDs are particularly problematic in poor communities, Primack said, and that was a reason for focusing on three urban high schools where about half the kids take part in a lunch program – indicating they fall below a certain income level.

“We divided the cohort into three … those who were exposed to the lowest amount (of music with degrading references), those who were exposed to sort of the medium amount, those who were exposed to the most,” he said.

“And those who were exposed to the most were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse, and that’s even controlling for all of the other factors that we looked at that we thought might be related to uptake of sexual intercourse.”

Do you limit the kind of music your children listen to? Do you want to start? Send us a comment and let us know.

[From Daily Mail]

Anger really can kill, doctors have warned.

Feelings of rage can trigger potentially deadly irregular heart rhythms, research shows.

The finding, from a study of patients with cardiac problems, could explain other studies which have linked the anger sparked by world events – from the loss of a World Cup match to a war – with heart attacks.

‘When you put a whole population under a stress factor, sudden death will increase,’ said researcher Dr Rachel Lampert.

‘Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart.’

Dr Lampert, of Yale University in the U.S., studied 62 adults being treated for an irregular heartbeat – a common condition which raises the risk of heart attack.

She said: ‘We found in the lab setting that yes, anger did increase this electrical instability in these patients.’

To read the rest of this article, click here.

You can also avoid being angry by avoiding these!

[From BlackDoctor.org]

According to a new study, teens who are smoking before the age of 17 may be putting themselves in danger of developing multiple sclerosis in the later years.

Researchers studied 87 patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) who were among more than 30,000 people who took part in the 2002 National Health Interview Survey.

The people were divided into three groups: nonsmokers, early smokers who started before age 17, and late smokers who started at 17 or later.

The people who started smoking before age 17 were 2.7 times more likely than nonsmokers to develop multiple sclerosis, the researchers say.

People who started smoking at 17 or later did not show an increased risk of developing multiple sclerosis compared to nonsmokers, according to the researchers.

About 32% of the MS patients were early smokers, compared to 19% of the people who didn’t develop the disease, the researchers say.

To read the rest of this study, click here.

CHEMISTRY! Simple as that.

[From Reuters]

Valentine Lotharios beware: There’s a lot riding on a kiss, new studies on the science of smooching suggest.

Researchers said kissing sets off a complex set of chemical reactions, and in some cases, a bad kiss could be the kiss of death for a burgeoning romance.

“A kiss is a mechanism for mate assessment,” said Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Jersey, who is presenting her findings on Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Fisher, an anthropologist, told a news briefing that kissing is something more than 90 percent of human societies practice, but scientists are just beginning to understand the science of kissing, which is known as philematology.

One theory of kissing is that it is intended to promote bonding. Wendy Hill, a researcher at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who is presenting her findings at the meeting, set out to test this on college students.

She was looking for changes specifically in oxytocin, a “love” hormone linked to feelings of sexual pleasure, bonding and maternal care. Since oxytocin has been known to lead to decreases in the stress hormone cortisol, she decided to look at that as well, she told reporters on Friday.

The researchers studied 15 heterosexual college couples between 18 to 22 who were assigned to either go off and kiss in a room in the college health center or just hold hands and talk to each other for 15 minutes.

Blood and saliva tests showed that men in the kissing group had a burst of oxytocin, but in women, levels of this hormone fell. “Cortisol levels for everyone declined,” Hill said.

Curiously, she noticed that females using birth control pills had higher levels of oxytocin than those not taking the pills, which may been a factor in the findings in women.

Hill also said the atmosphere in the health clinic may have had something to do with the findings.

“We are exploring the possibility that the setting was not very romantic,” she said. The next study will take place in a secluded room at the back of an academic building with flowers, candles, a sofa and jazz music playing in the background…

To read the rest of the article, click here.

[From Daily Mail]

Being lonely is as bad for your health as smoking or obesity, experts have warned.

Being cut off from friends and family can raise blood pressure and weaken the immune system, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference heard.

It can also make it harder to sleep and even speed the progression of dementia, according to psychologist John Cacioppo.

He found loneliness raises levels of the hormone cortisol and can push blood pressure up into the danger zone for heart attacks and strokes.

Research showed the difference in health between the lonely and the most socially active could be as great as that between smokers and non-smokers and the obese and those of normal weight.

Professor Cacioppo said: ‘When time takes its toll on the body, loneliness steepens that slope of descent.’

In his study, the loneliest people had blood pressure readings up to 30 points higher than those with the most active social lives, making them three times more likely to develop heart disease and stroke and twice as likely to die from them as people with normal blood pressure.

High levels of cortisol can also suppress the immune system, raising a person’s vulnerability to disease.

The lonely also sleep more fitfully, feel lethargic during the day and are more likely to rely on sleeping tablets.

Loneliness also has numerous other effects on health, including accelerating the pace of dementia.

It is not clear why this is but it may be their brains lack the suppleness of those who socialise regularly…

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Well, the Vatican says we are. According to a study approved by the holy see, when it comes to the sexes, both are guilty of excessive sinning. However, the main difference is that men are too fixated on sex, and women have overwhelming pride – two things that are apparently a no-no in the Vatican’s book.

Says the UK’s Times Online,

Sex discrimination is destined to continue in the scorching fires of Hell, according to a study approved by the Vatican which suggests that men are most likely to commit lustful sins whereas women are beholden to pride.

The men, it seems, are the ones whose souls end up being pelted with fire and brimstone, while the women’s souls are more likely to be broken on a wheel.

Monsignor Wojciech Giertych, personal theologian to Pope Benedict XVI and the papal household, said there was “no sexual equality” when it came to sin. “Men and women sin in different ways,” he wrote in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

Pride ranks only at No 5 for men, who are likely to have indulged in so much lust and gluttony that they are too slothful to feel angry, proud, envious or avaricious. Women are not averse to lust, but are primarily occupied with pride, envy and anger. Sloth does not set in until after gluttony and avarice.

“When you look at vices from the point of view of the difficulties they create you find that men experiment in a different way from women,” Monsignor Giertych said. His own observations had confirmed the survey, an analysis of confessional data carried out by Roberto Busa, 96, a Jesuit priest celebrated for his computerised study of the works of St Thomas Aquinas.

He said: “Diverse cultural contexts generate diverse habits – but human nature remains the same.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see much of a problem with this. Does this mean I’m going to hell, or that the Vatican could find more things to make a big deal out of? You tell me.

News articles always suggest supplements, new pharmaceuticals, and other costly ways to prevent disease, but a new study shows that you can reduce your risk of colon cancer by 25% through good, old-fashioned exercise. And we don’t mean going for a 3-mile run every day, either – just a simple walk can reduce your risk of one of the deadliest diseases around!

Says Daily Mail,

Regular exercise can cut your risk of colon cancer by a quarter, a detailed analysis has revealed.

Even walking reduces the likelihood of developing one of the most common cancers, the review of 52 studies from the past 25 years found.

It showed that of the thousands of individuals examined, the most active ones were the least likely to develop the disease.

The protection remained even after risk factors linked to cancer, such as diet, obesity and smoking, were taken into account.

The British Journal of Cancer study combined results from research covering many kinds of physical activity, including manual labour, jogging, working out at the gym and brisk walking.

Those who took regular exercise cut their risk of colon cancer by 24 per cent.

No way! We’re putting our cross-trainers on right after work.

Smoking isn’t the best for your health, to say the least, but if you’re with that person that is just too stubborn to quit, at least help keep them around for a little while longer with heart-healthy dark chocolate. Check out this article from BlackDoctor.org.

(BlackDoctor.org) — Just in time for the candy-clogged holidays, a new Swiss study finds a little dark chocolate each day could slow hardening of the arteries in smokers.

Chocolate is still no substitute for quitting smoking, of course, and the researchers add that the findings are not an excuse to binge on fattening sweets.

However, the results do “provide new important information about the potential beneficial effects of cocoa,” said study author Dr. Roberto Corti, from the University Hospital in Zurich.

His team assigned 20 male smokers to either eat about 1.5 ounces of white chocolate or dark, then evaluated the effects of each on blood flow and other parameters. Before the men ate the chocolate, they were instructed to abstain for a full day from other foods that are rich in the same antioxidants found in cocoa. Those foods include apples, other cocoa products and onions.

Then researchers then subjected the smokers to ultrasound scans and blood tests.

Two hours after the men finished eating the dark chocolate, the scans showed improved smoothness of the blood flow through the arteries — an effect that lasted eight hours, according to the report published in the January issue of Heart.

The dark chocolate also halved blood platelet activity, which in turn decreased the risk of blood clots. Antioxidant levels in the blood also rose among those who ate dark chocolate.

White chocolate did not have those effects, however.

A daily sweet chocolate snack is no substitute for stopping smoking, Corti stressed.

Another expert agreed. “In my view, dark chocolate can be included as part of an overall heart-healthy diet — for instance, adequately balancing its calories with a decrease in other desserts and snack foods,” said Jeffrey Blumberg, director of the Antioxidants Research Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, in Boston.

But he said that although dark chocolate contains high levels of flavonoid antioxidants, “it is not a health food, per se, because of its negative attributes — that is, fat and sugar. Further, I feel the only appropriate advice to smokers is to quit smoking.”

To finish this article, click here.

[From CNN Health]

When presented with a juicy cheeseburger, cinnamon bun, or other tempting treat, women may have a tougher time reining in their desire to eat when they are on a diet than their equally hungry male counterparts.

In a new brain-scan study, researchers flashed tasty food in front of men and women who hadn’t eaten anything in at least 17 hours. Both were told to fight their hunger, but only men showed a drop in activity in brain regions involved in emotion and motivation.

Men may have better tools for appetite control, which may help explain why women are more likely to be obese than men and have a tougher time dieting, according to the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Something happens in the brains of men which does not happen in the brains of women. It’s quite amazing,” said Paul A. M. Smeets, of the Image Sciences Institute at the University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

“[The findings] suggest that in real life there might be a difference in how good men and women are at suppressing this kind of desire,” said Smeets, who studies hunger and satiety using brain imaging, but was not involved with the current research.

Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and his colleagues used positron emission tomography, or PET scans, to observe brain activity in 23 normal-weight (or, at most, slightly overweight) people — 13 women and 10 men. They asked the volunteers to choose their favorite food from a list that included fried chicken, lasagna, barbecued ribs, ice cream, or pizza.

Then, 17 to 19 hours after their last meal, the volunteers had a brain scan while they looked at one of their favorites. Study participants could smell the food as well as see it (the researchers warmed it up to waft fumes throughout the room), and also were given a taste with a cotton swab placed on their tongue.
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Volunteers had three brain scans: once with no instruction on how to react to the food, once after being told to suppress their desire for the food, and once with no food in front of them. Health.com: Superfoods you need now

For women, brain activity was about the same whether or not they had been asked to suppress their desire. Men, on the other hand, showed a distinctively different brain activity when they tried to suppress their urge. They showed less activation in regions involved in “emotional regulation, conditioning, and motivation,” the researchers note, specifically the amygdala, hippocampus, insula, orbitofrontal cortex and striatum.

The researchers didn’t test to see if men truly were able to resist eating the food longer than women.

“We know that some people are very good — they can watch the food, they don’t eat — but some people can’t [be],” Wang said. He and his colleagues have shown a similarity between how people’s brains respond to food and how they react to addictive substances such as cocaine and alcohol.

Men and women were the same in one respect, however. They were both likely to say they felt less hungry when they were trying to suppress their desire to eat.

To read more about this study, click here.

You know when you’ve just broken up with the person you thought you’d be with forever, then you see an elderly couple walking down the street and wonder how in the WORLD they made it work? Well, for the embittered souls that rely on science to confirm or disprove their beliefs, a recent study has showed that true love really can last a lifetime.

According to CNN Health,

Using brain scans, researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have discovered a small number of couples respond with as much passion after 20 years together as most people only do during the early throes of romance, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper reported.

The researchers scanned the brains of couples together for 20 years and compared them with results from new lovers, the Sunday Times said.

About 10 percent of the mature couples had the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as those just starting out.

Previous research has suggested that the first stages of romantic love fade within 15 months and after 10 years it has gone completely, the newspaper said.

“The findings go against the traditional view of romance — that it drops off sharply in the first decade — but we are sure it’s real,” said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook, told the Sunday Times.

So what does this mean for the high divorce rate we’re facing today? Do you think people are just blindly jumping into commitments without feeling the actual love? Maybe some are more into the idea of being in love than actually being in it? Let us know what you think.