This may be the first time you’ve heard of it, but diets rich in choline may help protect your brain from the affects of ageing.

The nutrient from the B vitamin family is found in foods like chicken, eggs and saltwater fish as well as legumes such as kidney beans.

Researchers at Boston University found people who got plenty of choline in their diets performed better on memory tests and were less likely to show brain changes associated with dementia.

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Wouldn’t it be nice to get the benefits of a vigorous workout without having to sweat.

Some years ago, Clinton Rubin, a biomechanical engineer at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, set out to develop a non-drug treatment that could mimic the bone-building action of exercise. His research resulted in a compact platform, called the Juvent 1,000, that produces tiny up and down vibrations. Simply stand on the device, and the shaking motion is supposed to make muscles contract and put tiny stresses on the skeletal structure, leading to bone-building activity – just like real exercise.

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Most weight-watchers know that the best way to shed pounds is to combine a healthy diet with exercise, rather than just rely on one or the other.

However, scientists still know little about the relationship the two factors have with each other.

Now a review from Harvard University has found that starting a fitness regime first could be the key to tackling obesity.

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Health Canada contends that a maximum intake of 400 milligrams of caffeine per day is safe for healthy adults – an amount found in about three small (8 ounce) cups of coffee.

Women of childbearing age should limit caffeine intake to 300 milligrams per day as some evidence suggest that heavy caffeine intakes increase the risk of miscarriage.

During pregnancy, I advise women to consume no more than 200 milligrams of caffeine per day.

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When it comes to healthy eating, we’re told to choose our foods by colour. The darker and brighter the colour, the more nutrients and phytochemicals they have.

For many foods that’s good advice. Brown bread has more vitamins and fibre than white bread. Spinach, carrots and other brightly coloured vegetables offer more beta carotene than celery, cucumbers and other pale looking produce.

But dark versus light or brown versus white isn’t always a straightforward choice. In some cases, dark coloured foods don’t offer more nutrients than their white counterparts.

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Oprah Winfrey is taking a dramatic step she hopes will pump some life into her ailing OWN network.

The talk show queen, 57, is returning to the air in a new show called Oprah’s Next Chapter to be broadcast on the cable channel.

The series, which is set to début in January, will show the TV titan meeting and chatting with fellow celebrities in their homes.

The two-hour première will feature Winfrey meeting with Aerosmith front man and American Idol judge Steven Tyler at his family home in New Hampshire.

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It’s the chicken-and-egg question of aging: Do we become less active as we get older because our bodies start to break down, or do our bodies start to break down because we allow ourselves to become less active?

For years, it was widely accepted that humans would start getting slower, weaker and more fragile starting in their 30s. But new studies on topics ranging from the cellular mechanisms of aging to the time-defying performances of masters athletes are forcing researchers to question this orthodoxy. It seems increasingly likely that the first signs of decline are more a function of lifestyle than DNA: If you keep using it, you’ll be well into middle age before you start losing it.

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Demi Moore is determined to grab a slice of Ashton Kutcher’s £90 million fortune – in revenge for the betrayal that led her to seek a divorce.

Miss Moore, 49, once dubbed a cougar who fell for an ambitious toyboy, is said to have instructed her lawyers to ‘punish him financially’.

Her edict is in spite of a pre-nuptial contract with Kutcher, 33 – which she insisted on when they married in 2005.

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She was crowned Miss Bikini America after losing 80lbs following the birth of her second child.

And today fitness model Jennifer Nicole Lee showed just how she keeps herself in such amazing shape.

Wearing a pair of tiny bikini bottoms with the words ‘Big Fun’ emblazoned across the back and a stomach-baring tank worn over a neon pink bra, the 36-year-old raised temperatures in an already balmy Miami as she worked out at a South Beach park.

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If you want to keep excess snacking at bay, include enough protein in your diet. That’s the take-away message from a new study that investigated how the amount of protein consumed affects calorie intake and hunger.

People who followed a lower protein diet – 10 per cent of daily calories – consumed more calories each day than when they consumed a 15-per-cent protein diet. What’s more, the calorie increase was enough to cause a roughly two-pound weight gain each month.

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