Health

Obesity is a global health concern that can contribute to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other metabolic disorders. While many health conditions can lead to obesity, an increasingly worrying cause is found on grocery shelves: high-fat foods. These foods are known to be hard to resist and can promote overeating.

Only 13 low- and middle-income countries offer smokers the full support needed to help them quit, leaving around 1.3 billion people without access to effective care, according to a new study.

Most individuals encounter their health primarily through an annual health screening, which provides a limited snapshot of their health status. A new study by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), challenges the way we think about health and longevity by seeking to understand what occurs between those assessments, focusing on function rather than static markers and tracking how physiology changes moment to moment.

Three minutes of sprinting can do something that 90 minutes of moderate exercise apparently cannot: dramatically reshape the molecular contents of the bloodstream. Rockefeller researchers comparing different intensities of exercise found that six sets of 30-second, all-out sprints altered nearly a quarter of the proteins measured immediately afterward. Moderate, continuous cycling for 90 minutes altered fewer than one-quarter of 1%. And while moderate treadmill running changed more proteins than cycling, it still altered far fewer than a quick sprint.

An international study has found that despite two decades of global tobacco control efforts, the message still is not getting through to enough smokers that smoking and secondhand smoke cause heart attacks and strokes.

Coffee is one of the world’s most widely consumed beverages, and previous research has linked its consumption to a lower risk of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. However, the biological mechanisms behind these benefits remain unclear.

Taking the stairs could help you live longer—according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. The study, published today, suggests that climbing stairs significantly reduces the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

For decades, food manufacturers have been able to decide which food chemicals were safe enough to add to their products based on general government guidelines.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) account for nearly 60% of adults’ and 70% of children’s energy intake in the United States. These industrially manufactured products—such as soft drinks, packaged cereals and snacks, and processed meats—are made with refined fats, oils, sugars, starches, salts and other additives that can enhance flavor, texture and shelf life while reducing nutritional value.

In 2024, diet and nutrition apps had reached a global market value of $2.1 billion, with an anticipated value of $4.5 billion by 2030. Most of these apps now include AI-powered photo recognition as a standard feature.

There’s no shortage of weight-loss advice on social media, TikTok, television and AI chatbots. But the most credible source—a patient’s own primary care doctor—is often the one they’re not hearing from.