A steady lunch routine of cheeseburgers and fries may shorten your life, but loading your dinner plate with vegetables could do the opposite. Those are among the findings of a new study looking at the potential health effects of not only what people eat, but when. Researchers found that U.S. adults who favored a “Western”…  read on >  read on >

COVID-19 patients with mental confusion are at increased risk for a severe form of the illness, a new study finds. Researchers analyzed the electronic health records of more than 36,000 COVID-19 patients at five Florida hospitals. Of those, 12% developed severe COVID-19. Patients with mental confusion were three times more likely to develop severe illness…  read on >  read on >

One dose of a two-dose mRNA COVID-19 vaccine is enough to protect previously infected people, but it’s likely they and everyone with two doses will still require booster shots at a later date, a new study suggests. That’s because antibodies triggered through either natural infection or vaccines decline at about the same rate, the University…  read on >  read on >

Losing weight is hard, but many weight loss supplements promise to make the journey easy. Unfortunately, there’s little high-quality research to back these claims, a new study shows. Hundreds of weight loss supplements like green tea extract, chitosan, guar gum and conjugated linoleic acid are being hawked by aggressive marketers. And an estimated 34% of…  read on >  read on >

The pandemic not only cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, but it also appears to have triggered a deep drop in births, U.S. health officials reported Wednesday. Until 2020, the birth rate had been declining about 2% a year, but that rate dropped to 4% with the start of the pandemic, researchers from the…  read on >  read on >

Rashes, itchiness and other skin problems can develop after people receive COVID-19 vaccines, but such problems are rare and go away quickly, new research shows. For the study, the researchers looked at more than 40,000 employees of a Boston hospital system who received two-dose mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (such as the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines) and…  read on >  read on >

As vaccination rates among young Americans lag, the White House acknowledged on Tuesday that it will miss two key benchmarks in its nationwide campaign to stop the spread of coronavirus. The first missed goal will be vaccinating 70% of all American adults with at least one shot by July 4, but officials stressed that threshold…  read on >  read on >