(Stop the craving cycle before it begins and eat your way slim with the naturally sweet, salty, and satisfying meals in Eat Clean, Lose Weight & Love Every Bite!) Protein Flag Cake It wouldn’t be the 4th without a flag cake. Andréa’s Protein Cakery’s healthy version combines egg whites, protein powder (for the best texture, Andréa recommends using a pea blend like Sun Warrior Vanilla Warrior Blend, $45, amazon.com), and almond meal to bake a fluffy base....

It’s not very nutritious—and it won’t melt off your fat (or do most of the other crazy things you’ve read online). Sorry, devotees, but nutritional analyses show that ACV has little to no fiber, vitamins, or minerals. There’s also very little evidence to support claims that ACV can help you shed pounds. In one Japanese trial—the only study done to date to test the ACV–weight loss hypothesis—subjects took a daily dose of either ACV or water for 12 weeks....

Yeah, you could run in those cute walking shoes or older-than-dirt trainers, but please don’t. “When you run, you hit the ground with force greater than two times your own body weight,” says Jeff Dengate, shoes and gear editor at Runner’s World. “Running shoes are built with higher-quality, lightweight materials that help lessen that impact.” While a good pair can easily set you back $100-plus, making the investment now could save you a boatload later in potential doctors and PT bills....

McCarthy is researching the 21st century answer to aging happily, which she and other researchers call transcendence. Though transcendence sounds like something only levitating meditators achieve, it’s actually an attainable state-of-mind-slash-way-of-life, once you embrace the practices (see below) that help you rise above your challenges—no matter what they may be. These practices have one thing in common: They help you take a broader, big-picture view of life, says McCarthy. “The purpose of my research is to improve the quality of people’s lives,” she says....

You submit to the annual pokes and prods—and the copays and the “say-ahhs”—to stay healthy and put your mind at ease. But your annual health checkup might be doing more harm than good, finds a major new study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). A research team from Denmark reviewed decades of health data on more than 180,000 adults in Europe and the US. After first parsing out which people had received annual health checkups, researchers analyzed their health outcomes....

I don’t like to be too dismissive of a patient’s eye twitching, however, because it’s often a symptom of fatigue and stress (if not caused by a direct eyelid irritant). Chronic fatigue and stress can take a serious toll on your health in ways that go way beyond an involuntary eye twitch, including brain fog, skin rashes and bodily pain, and serious conditions like high blood pressure. MORE: 7 Weird Skin Symptoms You Should Definitely Get Checked Out Scientists aren’t sure why, but high stress levels can cause a part of your brain in charge of muscle control (the basal ganglia) to function abnormally....

Photo by Jonathan Pozniak Trading stationary stretches for more active moves is a better way to lubricate joints, reduce risk of injury, and get blood flowing to your walking muscles, studies find. Try these four moves showing you how to warm up for walking, courtesy of Tom Dooley, national walking coach for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training, before your next workout for a smoother, easier stride....

A group of 74 regular exercisers ran a series of maximum-exertion sprints interspersed with rest periods, during which researchers surveyed them on their post-workout mental states and offered either positive or negative feedback about how well they were performing. The effect? People who were told they weren’t up to speed with their peers became more and more psychologically exhausted after each sprint at a rate 20% faster than those who were given positive encouragement....

“Our findings suggest that low-dose aspirin may have beneficial effects on asthma,” says study co-author Dr. Tobias Kurth, an assistant professor of medicine and an associate epidemiologist in the division of aging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. But, Kurth adds, it’s too soon to recommend that anyone start using daily aspirin solely for asthma prevention. As many as 20 million Americans have asthma, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology....

A sobering 2018 study from American Cancer Society revealed colorectal cancer (colon cancer and rectal cancer) rates has been rising among adults in their 20s and 30s. At first, researchers chalked it up to enhanced screenings leading to early diagnosis, but later realized more young people were dying from the disease, which is the third leading cause of cancer deaths in America. About 105,000 people are expected to be diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2020....

The vast majority of eggs in the US comes from hens living in dismal conditions. Under current regulations, most hens legally live in cages so small that they can’t even spread their wings, packed into spaces the size of one piece of paper per hen. The new bill before Congress—H.R. 3798, or The Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments of 2012—aims to give hens more living space and ban some other harsh practices (such as forcing hens to molt by starving them)....

And by a few hours, we really mean a few. After studying the data of more than 84,000 postmenopausal women, researchers from the University of Washington discovered that in order for women to get the maximum benefit, they needed to perform 10 metabolic equivalents per week—equal to three hours of normal walking (up to 3 mph), four hours of light gardening, or one hour of moderate jogging (up to 6 mph)....

The survey results kicked off a recent roundtable discussion by holistic physician and best-selling author Deepak Chopra, MD, John Replogle, CEO of Seventh Generation, and Jeanne Rizzo, RN, president and CEO of the Breast Cancer Fund. (You can watch the full discussion by clicking here.) The mission of the roundtable? To increase awareness about toxins in everyday products to help Americans make better-educated decisions and limit their exposure. More from Prevention: 8 Tips for Avoiding Harmful Chemicals Here’s why your product choices matter so much: “Exposure to toxic chemicals in our everyday products may increase risk for many diseases....

Researchers from the University of Illinois College of Nursing measured the blood sugar levels of 83 diabetic women over the age of 40, and also asked them general questions about their health. Instead of shifting blood sugar levels being linked with fatigue—as is often assumed by doctors—other factors, like depression and BMI, were shown to be greater indicators of whether women felt constantly tired. More from Prevention: The Problem With Being Tired All The Time “People have always assumed blood sugar is the cause of fatigue,” says lead study author Cynthia Fritschi, RN, PhD....