1. No salt please.Conventional turkeys (with added salt solution) do stay moister but if you’re watching your sodium intake, avoid them.

2. Forget the marshmellows.Sweet potatoes are already sweet, so why load them up with marshmallows when just a touch of maple syrup or honey accentuates their great flavor?

3. Forgo the butter.The key to a tasty gravy is using the drippings from the roasting pan. This gives plenty of flavor without the added fat or calories.

4. Skip the skin. A 3-ounce portion of light meat without skin has only 132 calories and 3 grams of fat. With the skin, that jumps to 168 calories and 6 grams of fat.

Lack of exercise may greatly increase the risk of breast cancer, suggests a new study in the December issue of Cancer Causes and Control.

The study by Coyle YM at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center says exercise equivalent to a 30-minute walk five times a week can help prevent breast cancer, slow progression of the disease, enhance recovery and prevent the disease from recurring.

According to researchers, animal studies have found that exercise slows breast tumor growth by promoting changes in cellular reproduction and apoptosis (a form of programmed cell death).

Exercise training is safe in heart failure patients, does not significantly reduce hospitalization or death, but is associated with several improved clinical outcomes, even in those already receiving optimal medical care, researchers reported at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2008. The Heart Failure and A Controlled Trial Investigating Outcomes of Exercise Training (HF-ACTION) was presented as a late-breaking clinical trial.

The trial is the world’s largest study of exercise training versus usual care in heart failure (HF) patients, said Christopher M. O’Connor, M.D., principal investigator and director of the Heart Center and professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

A new study says that a regular exercise regime can significantly improve quality of life in heart failure patients.

The study led by Duke University Medical Center showed that exercise is not only safe for patients, but also helps to improve the quality of their lives. They fare better and feel good about their lives than similar patients who do not work out on a regular basis.

During the study, the researchers randomized participants to receive either standard care or standard care plus an exercise program.

The exercise regimen consisted of three months of supervised aerobic training on a bicycle or treadmill, followed by instruction for continued home-based training.

Activities that require greater physical exertion can prevent breast cancer in postmenopausal women with a normal body mass index (BMI). By contrast, extreme physical activity can only be protective in women who are not overweight or obese, while light exercise does not alter the risk of the disease. That risk reduction is estimated at 30 per cent.

In a research carried out for eleven years on 32,000 women in the United States, published in the latest issue of the journal Breast Cancer Research, participants were asked to complete a detailed questionnaire on the type of physical activity that developed.

Turning your clock back on Sunday may be good for your heart. Researchers noticed a reduction in heart attacks in Sweden on the Monday after clocks were moved back.

Swedish researchers looked at 20 years of records and discovered that the number of heart attacks dipped on the Monday after clocks were set back an hour, possibly because people got an extra hour of sleep.

But moving clocks forward in the spring appeared to have the opposite effect. There were more heart attacks during the week after the start of daylight saving time, particularly on the first three days of the week.

Elderly women who get five hours of sleep or less per night have increased risks of falls, according to a new study. Sleep medications had little affect on the connection, researchers added. Researchers analyzed sleeping times, efficiency and frequency of falls in nearly 3,000 women 70 or older. The average sleeping time was 6.8 hours per night for each participant.

Women with a sleep efficiency rating of less than 70% were nearly 1.4 times as likely to suffer a fall than women with an efficiency rating above 70%. Additionaly, individuals with two hours or more of wake time after going to sleep were about 1.3 times more likely to fall than those with less time awake.

A recent study has found that the combination of light exercise and specific nutritional supplements could help keep seniors fit for a longer period of time. The study is the first to study the effects of structured exercise and nutritional supplements specifically on the elderly. Researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University in England divided 60 seniors into two groups. One group performed moderate exercise once a week and the other performed high resistance exercise twice a week. Within those two groups, some received carbohydrate and protein supplements before and after exercise; some did not.

The Alzheimer’s patients who were non-carriers of the APOE4 gene benefited the most from exercising. APOE4 gene is known to increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
The theory is bolstered by a study published July 15 in the journal Neurology, which involved a group of 121 people age 60 and older, including 57 who had early Alzheimer’s. The participants were put on treadmills to measure their peak oxygen consumption, which is the standard used to measure cardiorespiratory fitness.
The study found that people with Alzheimer’s who had low levels of fitness had four times more brain shrinkage than those with Alzheimer’s who had high levels of fitness. However, lead author Jeffrey Burns, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Kansas School of Medicine noted that the study looked at fitness levels but not exercise activities. What remains to be seen is whether exercise itself can help prevent brain atrophy in people who are at risk for developing Alzheimer’s. “The cause and effect has yet to be established, but evidence is building,” Burns said.
Another separate study presented at the same conference revealed that a 12-month home-based exercise program reduced falls and improved balance in patients with dementia. People with dementia usually fall up to three times more than those who have no cognitive impairment, according to researchers from Western Medicine, a consultant physician service provider for Hollywood Hospital in Nedlands, Western Australia, which conducted the study.
“Falls have a negative impact on a person’s quality of life, often resulting in nursing home placement, increased mortality and significant costs to the community. Targeting this high risk may be a relatively cost effective way of having a significant impact on the overall rate of falling in the elderly,” Megan J. Wraith, a speech pathologist at Western Medicine and a researcher on the study said.
The two studies were funded by the National Institute on Aging and National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the Sir Charles Gairdner Research Foundation and Hollywood Private Hospital Research Foundation.

A recent study shows middle-aged members of a runner’s club were half as likely to die over a 20-year period as people who did not run.

Running reduced the risk not only of heart disease, but of cancer and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, researchers at Stanford University in California found.

“At 19 years, 15 percent of runners had died compared with 34 percent of controls,” Dr. Eliza Chakravarty and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Any type of vigorous exercise will likely do the trick, said Stanford’s Dr. James Fries, who worked on the study.