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You may want to skip the toppings on your next hot dog, or skip it altogether: Health researchers at the University of Michigan have found that eating a single hot dog could take 36 minutes off your life. In their study, researchers looked at 5,853 foods in the US diet and measured their effects in minutes of healthy life gained or lost. “We wanted to make a health-based evaluation of the beneficial and detrimental impacts of the food in the entire diet,” Olivier Jolliet, professor of environmental health sciences at the university and senior author of the paper, told CNN.

The team came up with an index that calculates the net beneficial or detrimental health burden in minutes of healthy life associated with a serving of food. It’s based on a study called the Global Burden of Disease, which measures morbidity associated with a person’s food choices. “For example, 0.45 minutes are lost per gram of processed meat, or 0.1 minutes are gained per gram of fruit. We then look at the composition of each food and then multiplied this number by the corresponding food profiles that we previously developed,” said the professor.

One of the foods researchers measured was a standard beef hot dog on a bun. Its 61 grams of processed meat resulted in the loss of 27 minutes of healthy life, Jolliet said — but when ingredients like sodium and trans fatty acids were factored in, the final value was 36 minutes lost. Consumption of foods such as nuts, legumes, seafood, fruits and nonstarchy vegetables, on the other hand, have positive effects on health, the study found. “The index is primarily there to help aid in selecting and using calories consumed on a daily basis to tweak a minimum of habits and make the minimum of change to obtain a maximum benefit for health and the environment from our food experience,” Jolliet said.

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Cutting Out Even a Little Salt Can Have Big Health Benefits

Sometimes, seemingly small changes in a health measurement can make a very large difference to people’s well-being. Such is the case with the effect on blood pressure of the essential nutrient sodium, the problematic half of the popular flavoring agent sodium chloride, commonly known as salt.

The amount of salt that is safe for people to consume has been embroiled in controversy for a century. Scores of studies of varying quality linking sodium intake and health have swung the pendulum back and forth, stymieing regulations to limit sodium in most commercially prepared foods. Some people are especially sensitive to sodium’s ability to raise blood pressure, but given how common high blood pressure already is, and how difficult it is to avoid consuming too much salt, many experts maintain that the safest approach is an overall reduction in sodium levels in prepared and processed foods.

More than 100 million Americans have high blood pressure, a disorder that increases their risk of heart attacks and strokes, and which, for many people, is made worse by consuming too much sodium. Just a four-millimeter rise in blood pressure — say, from 130 to 134 millimeters of mercury — can jeopardize the health of some people, and the blood pressure of those who are especially salt-sensitive can rise by 10 or more millimeters of mercury on a typical high-salt diet. In 2010, a Stanford University team estimated that cutting about 350 milligrams of sodium a day (less than a sixth of a teaspoon) would lower systolic blood pressure by only 1.25 millimeters of mercury yet avert about a million strokes and heart attacks.

The human species evolved on a very low-sodium diet of 200 to 600 milligrams a day. In fact, our bodies are designed to conserve sodium and get rid of potassium, which explains why a high-sodium diet can be a problem.

Though doctors have long argued that Americans should consume less salt, the wheels of regulatory action turn at a glacial pace, and modifying people’s taste buds is equally challenging.

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The importance of sleep for your body

If the nighttime teas and custom pillows didn’t make it obvious, Americans are desperate for quality sleep. Some of the benefits are apparent — feeling more alert and not clawing at a coffee pot all day is appealing. But there are other, more subtle ways quality sleep can do the body good.

Some hormones — the molecules moving around our bloodstream to regulate different biological processes — ride our biological rhythms mostly for the sake of making us sleepy. Others, however, rise and fall with those sleep-wake cycles even though they have different responsibilities, including regulating our immune systems.

For example, cortisol levels increase and decrease on a day-and-night pattern. This hormone plays a role in controlling our immune systems and can reduce the pain associated with inflammation. Getting too little sleep can disturb the cortisol rhythm and keep high levels of the hormone going for longer.

Other biological processes increase the immune system’s line of defense, and it turns out sleep might play a role in those factors, too. In the early 2000s, researchers gave hepatitis A vaccines to two groups of people and let one sleep normally while the other had to stay awake. The well-rested group developed an immune system reaction to the vaccine that was 40 percent higher than the other group — a good thing in this case, because the response indicated the vaccine was working. The researchers concluded that the result had nothing to do with cortisol reducing the immune system response of those who were awake, since the levels of the hormone in their bodies didn’t rise significantly. Instead, other sleep immune factors stepped in for the well-rested participants.

Os grandes centros de povoação que edificaram os espanhóis no Novo Mundo estão situados precisamente nesses lugares onde a altitude permite aos europeus, mesmo na zona tórrida, desfrutar um clima semelhante ao que lhes é habitual em seu país. Ao contrário da colonização portuguesa, que foi antes de tudo litorânea e tropical, a castelhana parece fugir deliberadamente da marinha, preferindo as terras do interior e os planaltos.

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A aceitabilidade de grupos distintos na sociedade cresce a cada dia. Algumas empresas conseguem notar esses grupos, porém, muitas outras, não.

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New player in cancer’s spread

When people hear that they might have cancer, perhaps the only thing more frightening than the C word is the M word. Metastatic disease — in which the tumor has traveled beyond its primary place to other spots in the body — is responsible for nine out of every 10 cancer deaths.

Recently an unexpected player in this process has emerged: a common bacterium. Fusobacterium nucleatum, which normally lives harmlessly in the gums, appears to have a role in the spread of some cancers of the colon, esophagus, pancreas and — possibly — breast. Laboratory studies and evidence in patients indicate that the microbe can travel through the blood and infect tumor cells by attaching to a sugar molecule on their surface. There it provokes a range of signals and immune responses known to cause tumor cells to migrate. If further confirmed, the work with F. nucleatum could add to a growing understanding of how the microbiome influences cancer progression and may even point the way to fresh approaches to treatment.