Bill A3103A landed on New York Governor David Paterson’s desk last week, and with his signature nurses in the state would see harsher penalties for the violent patients who attack them.

“The emergency room is a high-risk area to be assaulted,” says Debra Bibartolo, a member of New York State Emergency Nurses Association Government Affair Committee and AOL Health’s nursing specialist. “Nurses get hit. It’s reality.”

This is typical of how we Americans do everything backwards. The New York bill is one of many throughout the country that would make an attack on a nurse a felony charge instead of a misdemeanor, due to an upswing in the number of ER nurses being assaulted.

The more you sit around, the shorter your average life span is, according to a new study. The effect remained even after researchers factored out obesity or the level of daily physical activity people were engaged in, according to a study of more than 120,000 American adults.

We already kind of knew this anyway, but it’s always good to be reminded to get up and do something. Several studies have found a link between sitting time and obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease risk, and unhealthy diets in children, but until now few had examined sitting and “total mortality,”.

Time to get up and do something.

[USAtoday]

If you were to only eat food that was advertised on television, you would be in a terrible state and in the hospital before you knew it.

Your diet would consist of huge amounts of sugar and fat with hardly any fresh fruit and vegetables, according to researchers from Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia. They looked at what would happen if someone ate 2,000 calories a day only from foods that were advertised on TV.

They analyzed the food advertised during 84 hours of prime time broadcasts and 12 hours of Saturday morning broadcasts during one month in 2004.

Based on that, a daily diet of food from TV ads would include 25 times the recommended servings of sugar, 20 times the recommended servings of fat and Less than half the recommended servings of vegetables, fruit and dairy products.

And that was 2004. Just imagine if they did this today.

[AOL]

If you were to only eat food that was advertised on television, you would be in a terrible state and in the hospital before you knew it.

Your diet would consist of huge amounts of sugar and fat with hardly any fresh fruit and vegetables, according to researchers from Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia. They looked at what would happen if someone ate 2,000 calories a day only from foods that were advertised on TV.

They analyzed the food advertised during 84 hours of prime time broadcasts and 12 hours of Saturday morning broadcasts during one month in 2004.

Based on that, a daily diet of food from TV ads would include 25 times the recommended servings of sugar, 20 times the recommended servings of fat and Less than half the recommended servings of vegetables, fruit and dairy products.

And that was 2004. Just imagine if they did this today.

[AOL]

Maybe doctors are starting to realize that when you treat patients like actual people, they can heal. Patients with diabetes or hypertension who communicated with their doctors via e-mail got better care and better health outcomes, according to new California research.

The improvements as a result of the e-mail exchanges included blood sugar and blood pressure control. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has called for implementing “secure patient-physician messaging” as part of electronic health records by 2013. It seems like a good thing.

Kaiser Permanente health system started phasing in secure e-mail communication nationwide in 2004. In southern California, three million patients as well as all primary and specialty care Kaiser doctors signed up for it. By the end of 2008, 35,423 adult patients (7.8% of members in that geographical area) and 3,092 primary care physicians had used it.

People who have high levels of vitamin E in their blood appear to be at a lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study from Swedish researchers.

The study suggests that vitamin E may prevent cognitive decline, including Alzheimer’s disease, in elderly people. The study followed 232 people from the Kungsholmen Project, a population-based longitudinal study on aging and dementia in the Kungsholmen parish of Stockholm. All were 80 and older and were dementia-free at the beginning of the study. After six years of follow-up, they had 57 Alzheimer’s cases.

Researchers measured the blood levels of the eight components of vitamin E (alpha-, beta-, gamma-, and delta-tocopherol and alpha-, beta-, gamma-, and delta-tocotrienol) and found that people with the highest blood levels of vitamin E had a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s.

[AOL]

Most people think they smell bad after a workout or while sweating on a hot day, but others constantly have a false sense of bad body odor. Especially those with olfactory reference syndrome.

This syndrome has become so prevalent that psychiatrists are considering adding it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which doctors use to diagnose patients.

Katharine Phillips, of Brown University recently explained her findings on this condition at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting and said as many as two-thirds of these patients she’s worked with have considered suicide. Many stay at home, repeatedly showering and washing their clothes, because they are too embarrassed to go out and have others smell them.

[AOL]

Many men wear it every day. Cologne. But the ingredients that give colognes their scents could also be damaging sperm, according to a new study.

Researchers analyzed the chemical composition of 17 perfumes and colognes and discovered that many contain compounds that have the potential to interact with hormones. One chemical, a solvent called diethyl pthalate, was found in 12 products and was linked to sperm damage in a 2006 Harvard study. Of course, sperm damage can lower fertility.

DEP is just one of 12 different hormone-disrupting compounds in the colognes. As an example, Georgio Armani’s Acqua di Gio contains seven compounds that interact with either estrogen or androgen (female and male hormones) or both.

It may be time to reconsider your smell.

[AOL]

Lady Gaga, the highly energetic singer and star, has admitted to the London Times that she has been tested for lupus. However, the singer wouldn’t reveal the results of the tests, saying only, “I don’t want anyone to be worried.”

“I’m very connected to my aunt, Joanne, who died of lupus,” she continues. “It’s a very personal thing.” The star made news in March when she collapsed on stage during her ‘Monster Ball’ tour and had to cancel several shows earlier this year due to exhaustion, and many are concluding that the singer may suffer from the condition, which causes heart palpitations, shortness of breath, joint pain, anemia and extreme fatigue.

She admitted to having heart palpitations, but said that it was just from fatigue and other things.

[AOL]

Too much of any one thing is never a good thing. A daily diet of more than two pounds of raw bok choy, a vegetable used in Thai and other Asian dishes, sent an 88-year-old Chinese woman into a coma. Doctors determined that an enzyme in the uncooked produce was the culprit.

She was rushed to the emergency room of New York University’s hospital in New York City last summer after she became lethargic and lost her ability to walk and swallow for three days. She had been eating between 2 and 3 pounds of raw bok choy each day for several months, believing that it would help manage symptoms of her diabetes.

Moderation is always the key even with healthy foods. Her body couldn’t process so many stalks of the leafy vegetable, which contains an enzyme called myrosinase that, in excess, can shut down the thyroid.

[AOL]