Quotes About Health

We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman's vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies.

Denham Harman had not, in 1945, read an article about aging in his wife's Ladies' Home Journal and developed a theory that free radicals and antioxidants are at the heart of human aging. Harman's idea was never anything more than a hunch, and subsequent research proved it to be wrong, but nonetheless the idea has taken hold and will not go away. The sale of antioxidant supplements alone is now worth well over $2 billion a year.

Not incidentally, lead's symbol is Pb, for the Latin plumbum, the source word for our modern plumbing.) The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the

The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.

The more or less universal belief that we should all walk ten thousand steps a day—that's about five miles—is not a bad idea, but it has no special basis in science. Clearly, any ambulation is likely to be beneficial, but the notion that there is a universal magic number of steps that will give us health and longevity is a myth. The ten-thousand-step idea is often attributed to a single study done in Japan in the 1960s, though it appears that also may be a myth.

The best way to reduce snoring is to lose weight, sleep on your side , and not drink alcohol before retiring.

If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent. We live in a paradoxical situation. For centuries, people ate unhealthily out of economic necessity. Now we do it out of choice.

Suicide by lifestyle takes ages.

it became fixed in many people's minds that MSG was a kind of toxin. In fact, it isn't.

In the United States alone, more than eighty million people suffer from cardiovascular disease, and the cost to the nation of treating heart disease has been put as high as $300 billion a year.

The conviction that we should all drink eight glasses of water a day is the most enduring of dietary misunderstandings.

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It has long been known that heart attacks are more common in the dead of night, and some authorities think the nightly change in blood pressure may somehow act as a trigger.

One other enduring myth concerning water intake is the belief that caffeinated drinks are diuretics and make you pee out more than you have taken in. They may not be the most wholesome of options for liquid refreshment, but they do make a net contribution to your personal water balance.

more than half of all first heart attacks (fatal or otherwise) occur in people who are fit and healthy and have no known obvious risks. They don't smoke or drink to excess, are not seriously overweight, and do not have chronically high blood pressure or even bad cholesterol readings, but they get a heart attack anyway. Living a virtuous life doesn't guarantee that you will escape heart problems; it just improves your chances.

we now know that most viruses infect only bacterial cells and have no effect on us at all. Of the hundreds of thousands of viruses reasonably supposed to exist, just 586 species are known to infect mammals, and of these only 263 affect humans.

A person who smokes cigarettes regularly (about a pack a day) is fifty times more likely than a nonsmoker to get cancer. In

Candida albicans, the fungus behind thrush, until the 1950s was found only in the mouth and genitals, but now it sometimes invades the deeper body, where it can grow on the heart and other organs, like mold on fruit.

Cancer may be a common cause of death, but it is not a common event in life.

Ninety percent of people who lose smell through head injury never get the sense back; a smaller proportion, about 70 percent, who lose smell through infections suffer permanent loss.

Skin flakes are properly called squamae (meaning "scales").

What it comes down to really is cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without permission.

Even more appallingly, in the United States 80 percent of antibiotics are fed to farm animals , mostly to fatten them. Fruit growers can also use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops. In consequence, most Americans consume secondhand antibiotics in their food (including even some foods labeled as organic) without knowing