No matter how sophisticated or wealthy or broke or enlightened you are, how you eat tells all.

If you suffer about your relationship with food — you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all — you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don’t run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself.

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Prayer can heal, if it is hands on, study finds

Prayer for another person’s healing just might help, according to a new international study of healing prayer — especially if the one praying is physically near the person being prayed for.

Candy Gunther Brown, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, led the study of "proximal intercessory prayer" for healing to be published in the September 2010 issue of the Southern Medical Journal. It measured surprising improvements in vision and hearing in economically disadvantaged areas in rural Mozambique where eyeglasses and hearing aids are not readily available.

 "We chose to investigate ‘proximal’ prayer because that is how a lot of prayer for healing is actually practiced by Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians around the world," Brown said. "These constitute the fastest-growing Christian subgroups globally, with some 500 million adherents, and they are among those most likely to pray expectantly for healing."

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Reducing dementia – key factors

Eliminating diabetes and depression, as well as increasing education and fruit and vegetable consumption, are likely to have the biggest impact on reducing levels of dementia in the coming years, should no effective treatment be found, concludes a study published on bmj.com.

These findings suggest priorities for future public health interventions.

While the exact cause of dementia is still unknown, several modifiable risk factors have already been identified. These include vascular risk factors (heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and high cholesterol), a history of depression, diet, alcohol consumption, and education level.

Based on this knowledge, a team of researchers based in France and the UK estimated which of these risk factors might be most effective in reducing the future burden of dementia, should no effective treatment be found.

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Mind over matter? The psychology of healing

There’s been a lot of debate over time about how much attitude improves healing. Intuitively here at NewsUCanUse we’d like to think you can help yourself with positive thoughts, but not all the research points that way. Adding to the evidence that some attitudes can make things worse, is a new study from the UK.

People suffering from diabetes-related foot ulcers show different rates of healing according to the way they cope and their psychological state of mind, according to new research by a health psychologist at The University of Nottingham.

The large study published in the journal Diabetologia this month has shown that the way patients cope with the condition and their levels of depression, affect how the wound heals or worsens.

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What you say about others says a lot about you

How positively you see others is linked to how happy, kind-hearted and emotionally stable you are, according to new American research.

This research suggests that when you ask someone to rate the personality of a particular coworker or acquaintance, you may learn as much about the rater providing the personality description as the person they are describing. The level of negativity the rater uses in describing the other person may indeed indicate that the other person has negative characteristics, but may also be a tip off that the rater is unhappy, disagreeable, neurotic—or has other negative personality traits.

"Your perceptions of others reveal so much about your own personality," says Dustin Wood, assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest and lead author of the study, about his findings.

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