LIGHTEN UP|As if you needed more incentives to lose weight, here’s another: You’ll be doing something good for the environment. A professor and graduate student at the University of Illinois calculated cars use a billion extra gallons of gasoline a year to transport Americans who have grown markedly fatter. This comes after a similar calculation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that, based on the 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990s, airlines require 350 million extra gallons of fuel. That translates into an additional 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming.|U.S. News and World Report
CENTURY MARKERS|Want to live to 100? You have a fighting chance if you were the first-born child of a young mother. University of Chicago researchers who analyzed data gathered on 991 centenarians born in the U.S. between 1875 and 1899 found that first-born children were 1.7 times as likely as their siblings to live to be 100. And those whose mothers were less than 25 years old when they were born were twice as likely to reach 100. The study’s authors suspect younger mothers are less likely to have acquired latent infections during their life that could damage the health of the fetus. Younger mothers also may have better-quality eggs, researchers said at a Gerontological Society of America meeting.
