studies:

Chocolate consumption linked to lower BMIs

Trixie Tracker

If you have a new baby and you’re having trouble feeling organized, Trixie Tracker is an app for iPhone, Blackberry and more that allows you to track everything from diaper changes and naps to medicine and feeding schedules. To help ensure your baby’s health, this app also allows you to share this information with doctors and other caretakers.

Traineo www.traineo.com

Traineo is a website that combines a social networking support community with health and fitness tips to help you accomplish your weight loss goals. This tool allows users to learn more about diet and exercise methods that work for them while providing training resources and motivational messages from other members.

In a study from the University of California, researchers balanced all of the known health benefits and harms of chocolate and found that participants who reported eating chocolate more often were thinner as determined by their Body Mass Index. Researchers say the difference in weight was not a result of an increase in exercise or decrease in calorie consumption. The study does not promise that eating chocolate all the time will make you lose weight, but it does add to the growing pile of evidence that chocolate has health benefits.

Diabetes drug may fight cancer

Recent studies, including one presented in March at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting, suggest that the diabetes drug metformin may inhibit the growth of cancer. The study by researchers from Toronto looked at 22 men with prostate cancer. Those who took metformin for about seven weeks before their surgery had slower growing tumors than those who did not take it.

Can weight-loss surgery cure Type 2 diabetes?

Two recent studies published online by the New England Journal of Medicine suggest that weight-loss surgery such as gastric bypass can reverse Type 2 diabetes brought on by obesity at a far greater rate than medicine alone. While some participants were able to stop taking insulin in less than a week after their operations and others saw their disease go into remission for more than two years, doctors are not yet sure whether this type of surgery will be able to permanently eliminate the disease.