Certain antioxidants like vitamin C and E may interfere with your efforts to live healthier. When you exercise, you retrain your body to process insulin, which can help protect you against diabetes and metabolic syndrome (read the full article in the New York Times).

What happens is that when you exercise you create muscle and those muscle cells burn extra glucose. Over time, exercise improve your insulin sensitivity - meaning that you need less insulin in your body. This is good, because if you become insensitive to insulin, you could eventually develop diabetes.

Exercise helps improve your insulin sensitivity unless you take antioxidants. What happens is that the vitamins and antioxidants you take interfere with the body's own development of defenses and insulin sensitivity. The new recommendation is that if you exercise a lot, you should avoid taking too many antioxidant supplements.

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Some researchers are questioning whether drinking moderate alcohol really helps people live longer (see this article in the NY Times). Here's the main buzz: the link between living longer and drinking alcohol is an association. That means that there is, indeed, a link between people who drink moderately and people who live longer than average. The problem is that an association doesn't prove what is happening. It could be that people who drink a moderate amount of alcohol also do other behaviors that matter (such as exercising more or eating better foods). In the past, researchers have tried to control for these factors using surveys, but it is being questioned whether the surveys and other methods have really ruled out all the other factors that may make moderate drinkers healthier.

In the meantime, what seems pretty certain is that moderate alcohol consumption is not unhealthy and that it might even be healthy - so if you like to drink a bit, there is no reason not to (from a strict health perspective).

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This is big news, really. Researchers at the Unviersity of North Carolina have found a way to measure the age of a cell. As cells age, they increase the expression of a protein called p16INKa. Now there is a way to measure how old a cell is. Cellular age is critical in figuring out how behaviors, genetics and environment interact to age a person. If further testing shows promise, there may be a day when your "real age" is determined not by your chronilogical age or by a survey, but by the actual aging of your cells.

More on Cellular Aging

Every year the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality releases a report on state by state healthcare quality. In the report, you can look up how your state does on dozens of different measures of quality including asthma, racial disparity, and diabetes. It's actually pretty fun - each state gets an overall score and the data is presented in a very easy to understand format. I'm impressed.

State Healthcare Snapshots