Another reason you should go for a walk today: Putting in six to nine miles a week may help you remember that you left your keys in the freezer. This from a University of Pittsburgh study published in the journal Neurology that followed 300 seniors whose average age was 78 at the beginning of the study in 1989. Over time — about 13 years — one-third had developed “mild cognitive impairment or dementia.” But testing showed that more active walkers in the group had more gray matter and thus better cognitive skills. Thus, they were able to remember that after getting home from the grocery their hands were full as they pushed their way through the front door, climbed the stairs, entered the kitchen, shimmied the freezer door open with an elbow and put the ice cream in the freezer — along with the keys they were still clasping in their right hand.

Read more here.

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Another reason not to obsess over your Body Mass Index, that sometimes misleading indicator of one’s health:  According to a long-term study by two Australian institutions, the Menzies Research Institute and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, the circumference of a child’s waist is a better indicator than BMI of whether he or she will have cardiovascular issues down the line. In 1985, 2,188 Australian kids ages 7 to 15 had their waists measured. Twenty years later, the kids with a high waist circumference (in the top 25 percentile for their age and sex) were five to six times more likely to develop metabolic syndrome — various key cardiovascular risk factors — than kids in the bottom 25 percentile.

Read more here.

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Office jobs have become less physically demanding over the past 30 or so years and that’s why we’re getting fatter. That’s the conclusion of a study out of the Universite de Montreal which examined various Statistics Canada databases trying to figure out why we keep getting bigger. Quoted in the online Science Daily, lead author Carl-Etienne Juneau said: “People eat better and exercise more today than they did in the 1970s” — these are Canadians, remember — “yet obesity rates continue to rise. My professional hypothesis is that our professional life is linked to this seemingly contradictory phenomenon.” More evidence, perhaps, for Instant Recess?

Read more here.

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Finally, clinching your muscles is not only good for you isometrically, it can help you with everything from just saying no to a decadent desert to drinking an unsavory but healthy tonic to resisting pain. This from a study in the Journal of Consumer Research by  National University of Singapore and the University of Chicago. According to Medical News Today, researchers “put study participants through a range of self-control dilemmas that involved accepting immediate pain for long-term gain.” For instance, drinking a healthy but nasty-tasting vinegar drink and being tempted with a tasty but calorie-rich desert. Participants were then instructed to clench their muscles — any muscles. The clenchers  managed to down the elixir, pass on the desert — with one caveat: They had to want the benefits of the healthy drink, and they had to want to avoid the excess calories.

Say the authors: “The mind and body are so closely tied together, merely clenching muscles can also activate willpower.”

Read more here.