Seems the healthy fats from olive oil keeps bellies flat, which is a mighty good thing. You know why? Because excessive amounts of abdominal fat increases your risk for high blood sugar and other health problems. Now olive oil alone won't do the trick -- you've got to eat an overall healthy diet and exercise too. But getting a good amount of your calories from unsaturated fats, like those found in olive oil, can surely help prevent tummy troubles over time. They will also help you maintain better insulin sensitivity.

The Mediterranean diet is one you might want to adopt. About 30 to 40% of calories in this diet come from unsaturated fats. A diet you'll want to avoid: The high-carb diet. It tends to cause body fat to relocate to the belly.

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It isn't surprising that pregnant women are supposed to eat healthfully. Good nutrition will help a baby develop properly. But did you know that poor nutrition can not only negatively effect a baby's development, but it can also cause long-term damage?

A study by the Royal Veterinary College and London's Wellcome Trust, shows that when pregnant rats are fed fatty, processed foods during pregnancy, their offspring have high levels of fat in their bloodstream and around major organs -- even into their teenage years.

Fat gathered around internal organs has been linked to development of type II diabetes. Male rats tended to have higher insulin levels and normal blood sugar, while female offspring tended to have low insulin, high blood sugar, and tended to be more overweight.

While further research is obviously necessary, this is just one more link between healthy diet and a healthy life.

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Aside from the more widely known risks of running high blood sugars, researchers at the University of California San Francisco report that elevated blood sugars may be linked to a risk of dementia and memory loss in older adults.

The belief is that chronically elevated blood sugar may directly damage brain neurons or eventually cause health conditions that indirectly impair cognition. Being a fairly new discovery, there is little information available on how to prevent high blood sugars from affecting cognitive abilities, save for methods of keeping blood sugar levels low in the first place.

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Do you have what is considered to be a "sedentary lifestyle?" This would be a desk job during the day, very little physical movement before and after work (like taking elevators instead of stairs and watching TV instead of walking around the block). If you have this type of lifestyle recent research shows that you may be likely to have high levels of glucose in your blood.

Even though you may not be diabetic (yet), a recent study from Australia concluded the above after examining the association between television viewing and blood glucose levels.

Conclusion (only in women, interestingly): the more time women spent television viewing, the higher were their blood glucose levels two hours after they took the glucose test-drink. Result: get more exercise, whether it be walking or actually some kind of regular exercise on equipment. Something...anything.

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A recent study concluded that there was an association between cancer and higher than normal blood sugar levels. The study looked at 65,000 participants and was recently published in the industry journal Diabetes Care.

The researcher in charge of the study, Dr. Par Stattin from Sweden, added that by avoiding excessive fat and other dietary risk factors, and by getting regular exercise, "you can decrease your risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes -- and cancer." This all seems rather obvious to me, but we'll press on.

The study revealed that a group of 31,304 men and 33,293 women had glucose (blood sugar) measurements available reported 2,478 cases of cancer. In addition, women showed an increased cancer risk with rising blood sugar levels.

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When it comes to the world's top killers (not people, but causes), what comes to your mind? Heart attacks? Cancer? Those are in there along with high blood sugar -- which was a surprise to me.

Why? Because high blood sugar is an indicator of future diabetes problems, which definitely can lead to an early death -- and in many cases, does.

A new study out of Harvard University estimated that globally, over 3.1 million deaths are caused each year in over 52 nations just due to high blood sugar. One of he study's top researchers said that "Our results show that one in five deaths from heart disease and one in eight from stroke worldwide are attributable to higher-than-optimum blood sugar."

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In a new study, the incidence of pancreatic cancer was increased when cancer sufferers were found to have an abnormally high sugar intake. The Swedish study looked at the diets of almost 80,000 men and women between 1997 and 2005 in the study.

Out of this group, a total of 131 people developed pancreatic cancer, which is a highly-deadly form of cancer that is very hard to treat. The researchers then asked all participants about the consumption of foods -- particularly beverages -- that had large sugar concentrations and found out that the group of people who said they drank fizzy or syrup-based drinks twice a day or more had a 90% higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer compared to those participants that never drank those products.

If you can, drop soft drinks out of your daily regimen or at least decrease their consumption -- all that sugar is not good for anyone really (except the soft drink companies and their bottom lines).

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