Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to recent reports, an nationwide alert was announced Friday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about weight-loss products that contain undeclared pharmaceutical ingredients.

Herbal Xenicol, Slimbionic and Xsvelten are products added to the alert and fenproporex, fluoxetine, furosemide and cetilistat are all undeclared pharmaceutical ingredients added to the warning list.

The FDA stated that many of these crossed out products may be marketed as dietary supplements and are promoted and sold on various online web sites and in certain retail stores / beauty salons. These products are said to be illegal and haven’t been approved by the FDA.

To view an entire list of the weight-loss products, visit the FDA website.

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to a recent study published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, people at the age of 22 years of life peak their brain’s abilities.

Researchers studied the brain performance of two thousand men and women between the ages of 18 and 60. The study showed that people at the age of 22 peak in terms of performance with puzzle solving and other problems.

Surprisingly enough, reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualization started to drop at the age of 27. Would this be a sign of .. old age?

The study also showed that memory dropped around the age of 37.

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to recent studies, obesity can shave quite a few years off ones life. Some say it may be as dangerous as smoking.

Researchers at the University of Oxford analyzed 57 studies from Europe and North America. They followed nearly 1 million people for about 10 to 15 years. According to the studies, about 100,000 people died thoughout those 10-15 years.

The studies showed that people with a BMI (Body Mass Index) of 23-24 had the lowest death rates. Overweight people are classified in the 25-29 BMI range and studies showed that people with BMI of 30-35 shaved off nearly three years of life.

The ones with BMI above 40 lost about 10 years of their expected lifespan.

It is said that smoking shaves off nearly the same amount of your expected lifespan.

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - Famous radio host Don Imus announced on his radio show Monday that he’s battling stage II prostate cancer.

Known for his controversial opinions on everything from politics to sports, Imus 68, is confident that “his doctors will beat it”.

“The day you find out is fine,” he said. “But the next morning when you get up, your knees are shaking. I didn’t think I could make it to work.”

He believes that the cancer may be due to a increase in stress. Imus is well known for the 2007 Rutger’s Women’s Basketball Team scandal. After calling the championship-winning team “nappy-headed hos”, he lost his job with CBS, however was hired by ABC that same year.

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According the recent reports, D.C. health officials say that about 3% of people in the nation’s capital are currently living with HIV or AIDS.

That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 or 15,120 (according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the U.S.’s Washington district of Columbia’s HIV/AIDS office)

“Our rates are higher than West Africa,” said Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration. “They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.”

“We have every mode of transmission” — men having sex with men, heterosexual and injected drug use — “going up, all on the rise, and we have to deal with them,” Hader said.

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - US doctors have reported that a daily dose of peanuts may eventually help peanut allergic children build a certain tolerance to the food.

Although this sounds promising, doctors from the Duke University Mediacal Center and Arkansas Children’s Hospital have noted that the research is still ongoing. Parents and professionals should restrain themselves from trying it on their own.

“We have to wait for the studies to show the treatment is safe, and to see desensitization start to work,” said Wesley Burks, chief of the division of pediatric allergy and immunology at Duke in a press release.

The research shows that doctors have given a dose of peanut to 33 children over a 5 year period. The doses began as a small one-thousandth of a peanut and eventually grew to about 15 peanuts per day.

4 children were taken off the treatment and continued to eat peanuts, they said. 9 others have been on maintenance therapy for over 2.5 years.

Doctors examined a protein called immunoglobulin E (IgE). The protein is made in response to peanut allergens and researches show that its level has declined dramatically.

“Children in this study generally started with IgE levels greater than 25,” Burks said. “At the end of the study, their peanut IgEs were less than 2 and have remained that way since we stopped the treatment.”

“It appears these children have lost their allergies,” said Burks. “This gives other parents and children hope that we’ll soon have a safe, effective treatment that will halt allergies to certain foods.”

Peanut allergies affect about 4 million Americans in the United States and it is said that nearly 75 deaths are directly linked to peanut allergies.

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to recent reports, the United States has introduced laws to ban a toxic chemical from all food and beverage containers. The toxic chemical is suspected of causing serious health problems.

The move came a week after 6 major firms have decided to stop selling baby bottles containing bisphenol A.

BPA is a chemical used in the making of plastic materials, and it has been proven in previous studied that the chemical can hard a child’s development.

“The scientific evidence is mounting that BPA poses serious health risks, especially to children, and manufacturers and retailers have already started to pull items from store shelves,” Democratic Congressman Edward Markey, said.

The bill would force all sale of food and drink containers containing BPA. Products on store shelves would have to be removed, however food packaged in containers that contain the chemical would be allowed to be sold until depleted.

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to a recent study, as much as two of every five men whose cancer was caught via PSA screening tests have tumors too slow-growing to ever be a threat.

The work “reinforces the message that we are overdiagnosing prostate cancer,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society, who was not involved in the study.

Cancer Society states that more than 186,000 U.S. men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year and nearly 29,000 will die as a result.

The study which tracked prostate cancer in U.S. men aged between 54 and 80 between 1985 and 2000 showed that 23 to 42 percent of PSA-detected cancers would have never been detected in the man’s lifetime.

The study by researchers at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands was published online Tuesday by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to a recent survey conducted by Gallup, Utah is the place to live in, mainly because of Utah’s abundant demographic of youth combined with plenty of interesting things to do.

The survey featured over 350,000 interviews and consisted of over 42 various questions. Some questions focused on the mental, physical and economic health of Americans in order to determine the general well being of people.

Wealthier states ranked higher on the list compared to states with high poverty and low-income levels.

Western states also ranked higher on the list with Kentucky being last on the list.

“It’s not just about physical health,” said Eric Nielsen, a spokesman for Gallup. “It’s about their ability to contribute at work and be more productive, and it’s about feeling engaged in a community and wanting to improve that community.”

Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to recent reports, a 7 year old girl from Long Island has survived a surgery that consisted of removing a baseball sized tumor that was wrapped around her stomach and other organs.

Heather McNamara underwent the risky procedure and we can clearly say that luck was on her size this time around.

The operation was carried out by a team of surgeons from the New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York City.

They managed to remove the baseball sized tumor from her stomach, which was wrapped around her stomach, spleen, pancreas and other vital blood vessels.

The surgeons had to first remove her stomach and other organs, place them on ice to keep them viable, and once the tumor was removed, they reinserted them back into the patient.

“She’s left with a number of deficiencies (from the operation),” said Dr. Steven Lobritto, an internist, pediatrician and gastroenterologist with Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. “But all-in-all, we gave her a pretty normal life.”

Heather McNamara is said to have returned home yesterday.