Do you have a holiday party this weekend? There's one worrisome myth you can put to bed. It's the one about eating at night and getting fat. Not true.

Researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine have debunked the myth that eating at night makes you fat. For the most part, they say, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie (though some foods are certainly more nutrient-dense than others). The calories you consume at night are no more likely to take up residence on your hips than calories you consume in the morning. So make wise holiday-party choices such as alternating alcoholic beverages with glasses of water and loading up on healthier options and keeping higher calorie treats to a minimum. Then, as Wayne and Garth would say, party on!

Now, if you chow down on sweets and fatty foods and drink too much egg nog, all bets are off. Calories still count, even if the time of day you eat them doesn't.

Source

You should always listen to what your momma tells you. Unless what she's telling you is just an old wives' tale. Ella from Ruby Room helps us decipher the truths from the myths:

• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. There aren't too many people who would dispute this. A good breakfast gives you the energy to get through your day and it can even help you lose weight.
  
• Hot milk will help you get to sleep. Milk contains melatonin and tryptophan so it can help you feel sleepier.
  
• Beans are the musical fruit. They certainly do produce a fair amount of gas while digesting. But they're a healthy addition to your diet ... so they're worth it.
• Mixing drinks will increase your hangover. I remember a little rhyme from when I was in college: "Beer before liquor, never been sicker. Liquor then beer, nothing to fear." The truth is, it's simply the level of alcohol in your blood and the amount of dehydration that creates a hangover.
• Carrots will help you see in the dark. Carrots are rich in vitamin A, which is beneficial for vision. But the direct link between carrots and eyesight is far more myth than fact.
  
  

Check out the full article on Ruby Room to find out the truth behind other cliches.

Source

My fellow fitness pro, Chris Freytag, spent some time on NBC's Today, dishing out some great fitness tips. Her segment is titled Worst Workout Mistakes, but honestly ... I think the video should be titled "shake some sense into yourself." She answers a lot of the common questions I hear all the time. Spend a couple of minutes viewing this and learn a lot!

I'm trying to like running, really I am. Most of the time I do, and always, when I am done with my interval walk / run workout, I'm very glad I did it.

But sometimes, when I just don't feel like moving even an eyelash, let alone my whole body, I look for excuses -- any will do -- to skip my cardio workout.

Well, here's three less excuses I can use when I can't motivate my legs to move the rest of me into fitness. Apparently:

Source

I've been carrying my reusable water bottle around with me for quite some time now. I fill a pitcher with tap water and keep it in my refrigerator so I always have nice, cold water, and I really try to do my best to avoid drinking bottled water. However, a lot of people stick almost exclusively to water from a little plastic bottle, and while there are a multitude of reasons for this, a lot of these reasons don't have much basis in fact.

Marie Claire recently exposed six of the most common bottled water myths -- even if you're not a bottled water devotee, some of these busted myths might surprise you.

Source

Being overweight is not genetic. If you've heard otherwise, consider it a myth, says Scholastic Parent & Child magazine. There are very few inherited conditions that cause someone to be overweight. In fact, if everyone in a family is heavy and kids are following the same path, it's because lifestyle habits have been passed down through generations, not because weightiness is in the genes.

Ever hear yourself muttering these words to explain why your child is not exercising: "My kid's not athletic." Hey, guess what? You don't need to be athletic to be fit. One 30-minute walk every day -- a power walk, not a stroll -- is all one needs to achieve fitness. I'm not athletic. Still, I've found a way to be a pretty good runner.

Another kid myth: Talking about weight encourages eating disorders. Nope. But here's a fact: Talking about it in a positive light, focusing on exercise and not weight, and rewarding kids not with food but with activities and time together will help steer your kids in the right direction.

Source

Think sugar makes your kids go crazy? Nope, says Dr. Nancy Snyderman, author of the new book Medical Myths That Can Kill You: And the 101 Truths That Will Save, Extend, and Improve Your Life. If anything, there may be an associative link, which means sugar is often combined with social events -- like birthday parties and cupcakes -- and so it's the activity, not the sugar, at work. Really, study after study has revealed no link between sugar and hyperactivity, according to Snyderman, who takes on all sorts of myths and truths in her book, like these:

• Is ear wax linked to breast cancer? Yes, actually, it is. If your wax is moist and gooey, it can predict your risk for the disease, says Snyderman. Why the connection? Because the breast and the ear canals are both modified sweat glands. There's a connection, you see. Snyderman also says we should not be cleaning our ears every day. Wax is like lubrication and we need it.
  
  

• Medications should not be kept in bathroom medicine closets because bathroom heat and humidity can ruin them. Keep them in a hallway closet instead.
  

Source

At That's Fit, we've discussed the importance of good sleep many times. A restful night's sleep can boost your energy, help manage stress, and can even help you maintain a healthy weight. But there are a lot of notions about good sleep that may or may not be true. To help you decipher fact from fiction, Revolution Health busts some of those sleep myths.

• Myth: Health issues have no relation to sleep. Fact: Other health problems such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and depression can lead to sleeplessness or disrupted sleep patterns.
  
• Myth: The older you get, the less sleep you need. Fact: The average adult needs seven to nine hours of sleep. Older adults may have more disturbed sleep, so a short nap during the day can help them catch up on their body's need for sleep.
• Myth: Snoring isn't harmful. Fact: While, for some people, snoring is nothing but a nuisance, it can be a sign of sleep apnea.
  

Source

You really can't have a well-rounded fitness plan without including at least some strength training and although in and of itself it's a pretty simple concept, there are an amazing number of misconceptions out there regarding how to do things and what is and what isn't effective in building and maintaining muscle. Alive.com is looking to help us all clear up some of those misconceptions, though, with their list of the 7 biggest muscle myths.

Source

I remember doing the Jane Fonda aerobic workout with my mom when I was a kid. It was on a record. (Wow... I'm really aging myself here.) My mom's ideas of fitness are still roughly from that era. Every once in a while, when I talk to her about exercising she'll pull out a gem like "crunches will do away with belly fat." Umm... no. AOL Body has a slideshow debunking some fitness myths such as:

• Muscle turns into fat. Fat and muscle are two completely different tissues and one doesn't turn into the other.
• Crunch away ab fat. There's no such thing as spot reducing. Crunches will work your abdominal muscles, but it won't burn away the fat just in your belly area.
  
• High reps rule. When you're trying to lose weight and tone muscles, it is good to choose a weight that's light enough to do higher repetitions. However, if you're picking a weight that's so light you can lift it more than 15 reps, you're probably not getting much benefit from the weight at all.

Source

Can drinking water be harmful to your health? Why, yes, it can be, say two kidney experts. Now I don't mean excess amounts of water here. I mean your average daily recommended water intake.

How can this be, you might ask. Clearly, water is good for the body. It clears out toxins, keeps organs in fighting shape, keeps weight off, and improves skin tone. Not quite true, according to a new scientific review published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

"There is what I call an urban myth that drinking a lot of water is a healthy thing to do and it leads to people toting around plastic water bottles all day drinking water," says kidney specialist Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Goldfarb began studying the benefits of drinking water because of his interest in how the kidney handles fluids. With colleague Dr. Dan Negoianu, Goldfarb debunked four myths.

• Drinking a lot of water suppresses appetite. Nope. There is no consistent evidence of this. "Because you absorb water so quickly and it moves through the GI tract so quickly, it probably doesn't fill you up the way people have proposed, nor does it lead to the release of hormones which suppress appetite as far as we know," Goldfarb says.
  
  

• Filling up on water flushes toxins from the body. "When you drink a lot of water you end up having a larger volume of urine but don't necessarily increase the excretion of various constituents of the urine," says the researcher.
  
  

• Drinking water reduces headaches. It does not.
  
  

• Water drinking improves your skin. There is nothing to suggest that it improves the water content of the skin.
  

Goldfarb and Negoianu say that some people do have an increased need for water, like those living in hot, dry climates, some athletes, and people with certain diseases like kidney stones. But but no such data exist for average, healthy individuals. Or long-distance runners -- over-drinking during races is worse than under-drinking.

Goldfarb says he's not sure where the eight-glasses-of-water-a-day recommendation came from. There's just no rational basis for it, he says.

Source

My radio station co-hosts debunked a few health myths yesterday morning and some of the truths they shared surprised me a bit. What do you think about these?

We should drink eight full glasses of water each day. Nope. This myth dates way back and has long been perpetuated. But most of the water we need comes from our food -- if we're eating the right foods, of course -- and so consuming loads of water simply is not necessary. How much is the right amount? It depends on the opinion of the person you consult.

We only use 10 percent of our brains. Not true. Never has it been proven that 90 percent of our brains sit dormant. Imaging tests on a normal healthy brain will consistently light up all over the place, indicating function in all areas.

Reading in dim light will harm your eyes. It might cause some strain but won't lead to permanent damage or vision loss.

Does turkey really make us tired? Do our nails and hair continue to grow after we die? To uncover the truth about these questions and more, give a glance to this MSNBC article.

Source

When it comes to our health, we're constantly hearing different things from different sources -- sometimes it's even contradictory information! It's hard to know what's real and what's false. But here's a little bit of help: This article from Reuters explains at least a few common health claims:

• Reading in dim light won't damage your eyes
• Shaving does not make hair grow back thicker
• Eating turkey does not make you drowsy
• We don't only use 10% of our brains
• Hair and nails do not keep growing after death
• There's no evidence to support that mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals
• There's also no evidence to support that you need 8 glasses of water a day.
  

Interesting, huh? As far as the last one goes, though, I do think you need lots of water, if only to supress your appetite from spinning out of control.

Want to know the reasons behind these? Click here.

Source

The flu has been around since the beginning of time, and in all those years and centuries more than a few misconceptions and myths have come to be believed as truth. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that for all our technology we still can't cure it, or that it can manifest itself in so many ways, or simply because there's just too much room for people's imagination to run wild with the symptoms. Even many people who should know better, like health care workers, often believe incorrect facts about the flu. Do you think you're in the know? Or are you a victim of myth and old-wives tales? Find out the 12 most common flu myths and share your thoughts in the comments!

Source

You could crunch you way to abs like Arnold Schwarzenegger's but if you have a layer of body fat over them, they'll never show. It's a myth that crunches will burn the fat off your belly. Modify your diet and start moving on a treadmill. Now that will work.

Fitness professionals Chris Hoover and Jeremy Koerber debunk the crunch myth and nine others in this article. They tell us it's just not true that weightlifting makes women bulky: "Unless they are using steroids, it's not going to happen," says Hoover. These guys also report that there is not actually an easy way to lose weight.

"It's called work. (That person in that ad) didn't get that body in 20 minutes a day, three days a week," says Koerber. "It's just not possible."

What about the belief that workouts must be intense to be beneficial? Nope. Actually, the body burns fat as efficiently when you do low to moderate-intensity workouts. Unfortunately, though, it takes longer to burn calories this way.

Click here to find out what these fitness guys say about sweating, stretching, aging, and workouts that hurt. Then tell us what you think.

Source