PROTIME-FITNESS HOLISTIC HEALTH AND WELLNESS

  These Are Some of the Best Diets for 2025, Report Says By Denise Maher, HealthDay Reporter FRIDAY, Jan. 3, 2025 -- Wondering which popular diet will help you shed extra weight in a healthy way this year? The Mediterranean diet tops the best diet categories in the U.S. News & World Report 2025 edition. According to the report, the eating style that refers to the traditional eating habits of people who live in the countries that border the Mediterranean Sea is the most highly rated diet across most categories. Despite having the words "diet" in its name, it's not one particular branded diet but more of a broad eating pattern. It is heart-healthy and has been proven to help reduce risk factors leading to obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. Each year, a panel of medical and nutrition experts works with U.S. News & World Report to review various eating plans and flag the ones they find to have the best healthy eating options. "This year...

  FDA: Listeria Concerns Prompt Broccoli Recall at Walmart Stores FRIDAY, Jan. 3, 2025 -- Braga Fresh is voluntarily issuing a recall of its Marketside Broccoli Florets due to possible  Listeria  contamination, according to a company announcement posted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The company has issued a recall of the 12-oz bags in 20 states after testing uncovered  Listeria  bacteria in one sample. The affected bags were sold at more than 1,000 Walmart stores in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The broccoli bags are past their "best by" date of Dec. 10, 2024, but Braga Fresh is warning customers who may have frozen the product for later use. According to the recall notice, the contamination was discovered during random testing at a Texas store. While no illnesses have been reported, the FDA urges ...

  7 Surprising Ways to Make 2025 Health By Denise Maher, HealthDay Reporter SATURDAY, JAN. 4, 2025 -- Some standard health tips are timeless, aren't they? The basics of living a healthy life don't really change. Get lots of sleep and rest, exercise, and eat nutrient-rich food. Manage stressors and symptoms. But as essential as those rules can be, it is still hard to practice them consistently. What's more, wellness is more about enhancing your life than following rules. As a new year dawns, UCLA Health experts share some of their most practical and not-always-obvious feel-good advice. Here are seven smart tips from seven different health and wellness experts. 1. Keep Doing the Good-for-You Things You Already Do "Most of what people can do to have a healthy 2025 is not much different than what they could do to have a healthy 2024: exercise; don't smoke; drink alcohol in moderation, if at all; stay engaged; and keep your mind stimulated. Be decent in every interactio...

  BRAIN RESHAPING MAY BE A REALITY SOON Scientists have developed a novel approach to human learning through noninvasive manipulation of brain activity patterns.         Imagine being able to inscribe a new pattern of activity into a person's brain that would allow for faster learning or better treatment of psychiatric and developmental disorders such as depression or autism. Now imagine being able to do that in a way that doesn't require brain surgery or any physical manipulation. Sounds like science fiction? It still is. But that's precisely what Coraline Iordan, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences and neuroscience at the University of Rochester, has been working toward, showing for the first time that it can certainly be done for learning new visual categories of objects. Learning happens when our brain changes through experience, study, or instruction. However, Iordan and colleagues at Yale and Princeton successfully tested a novel approac...

  Why Does Cancer Spread to the Lungs So Often? By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay Reporter FRIDAY, Jan. 3, 2025 -- The lungs are a tempting place for cancer cells -- so much so that more than half of people with advanced cancer elsewhere in their bodies wind up with lung tumors. Researchers now think they know why. A study published on Jan. 1 in the journal Nature reported that aspartate levels of an amino acid allow cancer cells to grow more easily inside the lungs. "We found high levels of aspartate in the lungs of mice and patients with breast cancer compared to mice and patients without cancer, which suggests that aspartate may be important for lung metastasis," lead researcher Ginevra Doglioni, a doctoral student with the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology's Center for Cancer Biology in Belgium, said in a news release from the college. For the study, researchers examined the genetic activity of tumor cells taken from aggressive  lung cancers . They found that aspartate ...

  BLACK ATHLETES MORE LIKELY TO DIE FROM SUDDEN CARDIAC ARREST THAN WHITE ATHLETES A recent central review of data published by the  Lancet  and led by Emory sports cardiologist Jonathan Kim, MD, shows that Black athletes are approximately five times more likely to experience sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) and sudden cardiac death (SCD) compared to White athletes, despite some evidence of a decline in rates of SCD overall. SCA and SCD have historically been a leading cause of mortality among athletes, particularly those involved in high-intensity sports. According to Kim, the disparities in SCA/D rates highlight the need for increased research into the social determinants of health in younger athletes, a topic that remains understudied, After examining a repository of national and international data focused on SCA/D in athletes accumulated over the last 30 years, Kim and colleagues from Lausanne University Hospital, Morristown Medical, Massachusetts General Hospital, and oth...

  LONELINESS REMAINS TOO HIGH FOR OLDER ADULTS Six-year trends from the National Poll on Healthy Aging for people aged 50 to 80 show key groups that are most vulnerable, especially those with fair or poor physical or mental health         Loneliness and isolation among older Americans have mostly returned to pre-pandemic levels. However, a new national study shows that more than one-third of people aged 50 to 80 still feel lonely, and nearly as many feel isolated. And some older adults -- especially those dealing with significant physical health or mental health issues -- still have much higher rates of loneliness and social isolation than others. A University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation team published the findings in JAMA. They reviewed six years of data from the National Poll on Healthy Aging ( https://www.healthyagingpoll.org/ ). Starting in 2018 and most recently in 2024, the poll asked older adults nationwide how often they fe...

  More Activity, Less Risk: Tell Your MD How Much You Move By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay Reporter FRIDAY, Jan. 3, 2025—It's not fun for people to admit to their doctor that they're couch potatoes. However, a new study says that such a frank talk could help protect against chronic disease. People with the highest levels of physical activity have a lower risk of 19 different chronic health problems, researchers reported recently in the journal  Preventing Chronic Disease . Researchers found that those who got at least 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise were less likely to develop heart disease,  cancer , lung problems,  diabetes , and other debilitating ailments. On the other hand, folks who got little to no exercise had more risk of chronic disease, results show. Based on these findings, researchers recommend that doctors ask patients about their physical activity and provide encouragement to those who need to get more exercise. "In our health care en...

  CLOZAPINE ASSOCIATED WITH LOW CANCER RISK          An inter-departmental research team at the LKS Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong (HKUMed) has conducted the world's first analytic real-world cohort study on the association of clozapine, a highly efficacious antipsychotic drug, with the incidence of blood cancer. Their findings show that the risk of blood cancer associated with the use of clozapine is very low, with an average increase of less than six cases per 10,000 persons using clozapine for one year. Therefore, the clinical significance of such a risk is plausibly low. While previous preliminary Western studies have shown a potentially significant increase in risk, this study suggests that with stringent blood monitoring measures before and during clozapine use in Hong Kong and around the world, it may not be necessary to further restrict the use of clozapine or issue special warnings by the Department of Health or local drug regul...