Cancer: The plant kingdom heroes continue to surface. According to research done in St. Louis University, the extract from bitter melon – a vegetable commonly used in Indian and Chinese cuisine and medicine – attacks breast cancer cells. The study, published in the March 1 edition of the journal Cancer Research, found that bitter melon extract significantly induced death in breast cancer cells and decreased their growth and spread in vitro by triggering a chain of events that kills the cells and prevents them from multiplying.  Bitter melon (shown above) is also often used in India and China as medicine for diabetics due to its ability to lower blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

Green Living: Looks like urban “green” spaces don’t help global warming after all. Turfgrass lawns – gardens created within urban spaces – help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and store it as organic carbon in soil, creating important “carbon sinks”. Unfortunately, greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer production, mowing, leaf blowing and other lawn management practices create the same or more greenhouse gases than is being “cleaned”, including nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. In other words, these lawns can’t help the green house effect because maintaining them takes too much energy. The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, also showed that when it came to ornamental lawns, athletic fields fared even worse: Because of the constant tilling, they didn’t trap as much carbon, but required the same amount of gas-emitting maintenance. Superbowl who?

Pregnancy: Keep your weight in check – Women who gain excessive weight during pregnancy, especially in the first trimester, may increase their risk o developing diabetes later in their pregnancy. The three-year study, published in the online issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, looked at 1,145 pregnant women from ethnically diverse backgrounds and found that women who gained more eight than is recommended by the Institute of Medicine had a 50% increased risk of developing gestational diabetes, a  condition defined as glucose intolerance that typically occurs during the second or third trimester of pregnancy. It can cause complications and lead to early delivery, C-sections and type 2 diabetes and can increase the child’s risk of developing diabetes and obesity later in life.

Emotions: Remember the song “Don’t worry, be happy?” If you want a healthy heart, follow its advice.  According to a major study published in Erupoe’s leading cardiology journal, the European Heart Journal, people who are usually happy, enthusiastic and content are less likely to develop heart disease and than their grumpy counterparts. Small, temporary moments of depression didn’t affect the overall risk of heart disease as long as the person was usually positive. The researchers measured “positive affect”, the experience of pleasurable emotions such as joy, happiness, excitement, enthusiasm and contentment – usually stable and trait-like feelings, particularly in adulthood. Of the 1,739 healthy adults studied over a period of 10 years, participants with no positive affect were at a 22% higher risk of heart attack or angina than those with a little positive affect, and those were at 22% higher risk than those with moderate positive affect.  In other words, the happier you are, the healthier you heart will be. Don’t wait for vacations – include activities that you enjoy into your daily routine. Spend some time relaxing and enjoying yourself – whether that means reading a good book or going for a midday walk.

Parenting: A study has found that autism’s earliest symptoms don’t become evident until after a child is six months of age. A lack of shared eye contact, smiling and communicative babbling – typical signs of autism development – are not present at six months, but emerge gradually and only become apparent during the later months of the first year of life.  “Most babies are born looking relatively normal in terms of their social abilities but then, through a process of gradual decline in social responsiveness, the symptoms of autism begin to emerge between 6 and 12 months of age,” said head author Sally Ozonoff. The study is published in the online edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Eyes: A new report raises the possibility that green tea – renown for its powerful antioxidant content and disease-fighting properties – may protect against glaucoma and other common eye diseases. Green tea “catechins” have been among a number of antioxidants thought capable of protecting the eye (others include Vitamin C and E, lutein and zeaxanthin). Until now, however, nobody knew if the catechins in green tea actually passed from the stomach and intestines into the tissues of the eye. This study confirmed that eye structures absorbed significant amounts of the individual catechins after green tea consumption. The report, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, concludes that green tea consumption could benefit the eye against oxidative stress.

Brain: It’s siesta time. New research from UC Berkley shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore brain power. The findings suggest that a two-phase sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind – it can make you smarter. The opposite is also true: The more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the study. For college students used to pulling an all-nighter this is bad news: Staying up all night decreased the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40%, due to certain regions of the brain shutting down during sleep deprivation. Sleep moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap, said lead investigator Matthew Walker, as if your mental inbox were cleared out during the nap and made you ready to receive more information. The researchers found that the second stage of sleep, a place between deep sleep (non-REM) and the dream state known as REM, which previously didn’t have a specific purpose, is the spot where the  memory-refreshing process takes place for nappers.