A new study has found a strong link between eating nuts when pregnant and having asthmatic children. The study, out of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, tracked the diets of over 4000 pregnant mothers and found that those who ate nuts or nut products daily during pregnancy were 50 percent more likely than rare nut eaters to give birth to kids who developed asthma by age eight. Even after other dietary factors were controlled for, the one consistent factor among the asthmatic children appeared to be that their moms had consumed peanut butter every day during pregnancy. Interestingly, there was no correlation found between maternal nut consumption and childhood development of allergies to nuts. (There was, however, a slight correlation between maternal fruit consumption and reduced asthma symptoms.)

To treat osteoporosis, doctors usually recommend calcium supplements, hormones, and most likely a medication to halt bone loss. In fact, they order the bone-loss drugs with such frequency that the most commonly prescribed medication, Fosamax, netted whopping sales of $3 billion in 2007. And those revenues tell just part of the story. Fosamax belongs to a class of drugs called bisphosphanates, which brought in $6.2 billion in 2004, with over 10 million users and a projected annual growth rate of almost seven percent.

People have been dying from contaminated meat for years. The latest incident seems to have prodded the USDA into making a feeble gesture towards helping consumers figure out how to avoid inadvertently buying problematic meat. In a policy-shift last week, the USDA announced that it will start posting the names of retailers that carry contaminated meat and poultry that's subject to recall. This decision comes many months after the release of the "downer cows being tortured on the way to slaughter" video that led to the recall of hundreds of millions of pounds of beef, and a week or so after the recall of 5.3 million pounds of E-coli contaminated beef that sickened at least 40 people in the Midwest.

For years, proponents of antioxidant supplements have suggested taking the supplements with food. Why? Because they come that way in nature -- as part of food -- so it makes commonsense and because, anecdotally, antioxidants just seem to work better when taken with meals. Now we may just know why. They protect the body, not just in the bloodstream, but also in the stomach.

When cancer strikes, even the alternative-minded among us sometimes get scared into the arms of the medical mainstream -- and unfortunately, that's not necessarily advantageous. For example, in the case of at least one highly touted traditional approach -- hormone therapy for early prostate cancer -- evidence now shows that the treatment imparts absolutely no benefit for older men, and plenty of risk. Because prostate cancer tends to grow slowly in people over 70, most elderly patients choose to avoid risky surgery or radiation therapy unless their cancer spreads more rapidly than anticipated. Instead, they opt to see if the cancer becomes problematic -- an approach known as "conservative management" -- or, quite frequently, they undergo androgen-deprivation (hormone) therapy, which blocks the production of male hormones via drugs or implants.

In a move that indicates that the medical community suffers from collective amnesia, the American Academy on Pediatrics just recommended new guidelines that would subject more than 30 percent of all kids between the ages of two and ten to cholesterol screening tests. Whereas previous guidelines suggested testing only kids with a family history of heart disease, the new standards include all children who are overweight, who have diabetes or hypertension, or who smoke (yes, apparently there are enough smoking tots to warrant mention in the guidelines!).

When it comes to skyrocketing obesity rates, everyone seems to have a theory: go low-carb, high-carb, high-protein, raw, cut portions, do aerobics, weight train -- and still, the pounds keep piling on the population at large.  Self-discipline clearly has been established as a failed modality -- with 99% of dieters unable to keep weight off permanently. But now the American Heart Association has a new idea that will take some of the onus off of chubby individuals. It says that we need to institute weight-management initiatives on a societal level by making it easier for people to choose healthy options.

Couch potatoes and French-fried potatoes -- these are the things we commonly blame for the obesity epidemic. But now, a new analysis indicates that it's the potatoes more than the sofa making people fat. According to researchers in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, people today are no less active than they were 20 years ago. In fact, the researchers found that subjects in the US and Europe burned an equivalent number of calories on a daily basis when compared to subjects in non-industrialized, developing countries and even when compared to wild animals.

You turn on the water, pull back the curtain, soap up, rinse off -- and feel clean and new as you dry yourself with your towel. But alas! Though you may feel all sparkly and refreshed, there's a good chance that your morning shower has compromised your health.

First off, there's the shower-curtain issue. A new report just released by the Center for Health, Environment & Justice indicates that chemicals used in vinyl shower curtains can cause serious damage to the liver as well as to the nervous, reproductive, and respiratory systems. You know that "new shower-curtain smell" you notice when you first hang your liner or the curtain with the cute pictures of smiling fish on it? It turns out that smell comes from the presence of deadly chemicals, including phthalates (hormone disruptors) and organotins (attack white blood cells), which are used to soften the plastic, as well as from an array of toxic organic compounds.

A study out of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore has shown that depressed people have a stunning, 42- percent increased risk of developing diabetes when compared to people who aren't depressed. The study followed 5,201 people, aged 45 to 84, for three years. The subjects did not have diabetes at the outset of the study. Even when the researchers controlled for pre-existing factors such as obesity, inactivity, and smoking, they found that risk for diabetes was still 34 percent higher in patients with depression. They also found that the deeper the depression, the greater the likelihood that the subject would become diabetic.