TORONTO - Worried about your ever increasing waistline? Cut down the use of artificial sweeteners as they may be associated with long-term weight gain and increased risk of obesity, a study has warned. Artificial sweeteners are substitutes for sugar that provides a sweet taste like that of sugar while containing significantly less food energy. The findings showed that artificial sweeteners or non-nutritive sweeteners may have negative effects on metabolism, gut bacteria and appetite.

LONDON - Love to play word puzzles such as crosswords? It may improve brain function and keep your brain ten years younger, a study has found. The results indicated that the more regularly people engaged with word puzzles, the better they performed on cognitive tasks assessing attention, reasoning and memory -- decline of which may lead to the development of dementia. Further, such people also have brain function equivalent to ten years younger than their age on tests of grammatical reasoning speed...

NEW DELHI - Do you wish to reduce weight within 10 ten days? If you eat right, perform the correct exercises and follow a healthy regime, you are bound to lose the excess pounds. Manish Dagar, an expert at fitness club Celebrity Fitness, has doled out some tips: * Diet: Diet rules for waist training are that a person has to be calorie deficit. Daily consumption of at least five to six small meals should also be on right amount of protein...

WASHINGTON: A team of Indian American researchers has developed a user-friendly resource to make the powerful gene-editing tool more friendly. The breakthrough has the potential to facilitate new discoveries in gene therapies and basic genetics research. The gene-editing technique called CRISPR/Cas9 has been widely adopted to make precise, targeted changes in DNA. The team describes an approach to...

SYDNEY - Compared to those in the developed world, middle classes in India and other developing countries are more susceptible to Type-2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases, thanks to their undernourished ancestors, says a study. The results, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, could explain projections that more than 70 percent of the global burden of Type-2 diabetes will fall on individuals from...

NEW YORK - Google is reportedly developing a smart contact lens that will measure a wearer's glucose levels by testing their tears. In a patent application, Google showed off potential designs for how it could package a smart contact lens. Google has previously said it is speaking to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about potentially testing its lens, and that general availability of the contact lens is most likely...

LONDON - A brain protein believed to be a key component in the progress of dementia can cause memory loss in healthy brains even before physical signs of degeneration appear, says a new University of Sussex study. The study reveals a direct link between the main culprit of Alzheimer's disease and memory loss. Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain tissue.

WASHINGTON,D.C.-In a curtain-raiser event for the First International Day of Yoga on June 21, the newly founded Congressional Yogi Association organized the first-ever “Yoga on the Hill” at Capitol Hill. Supported by the Embassy of India in Washington, the May 1 event was organized to advocate better physical and mental health for US military veterans. The event was led by Keith Mitchell,

WASHINGTON - Indian parliamentarian Tarun Vijay has urged fellow lawmakers from around the world to popularise yoga in their countries as an effective instrument of preventive healthcare. As many as 170 countries at the UN had supported Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to declare June 21 as International Day of Yoga, the Bharatiya Janata Party MP noted at a Global Parliamentary Conference at the World Bank here Sunday.