Dieting

Take two slices of cherry pie and call me in the morning. OK. That's not quite the advice doctors are wont to give. But it might make at least a sliver of sense. Cherry pie contains the same sort of anti-inflammatory compounds as aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs - at least the cherries do. They're tart, or sour, cherries, which, as far as is known, contain more of these anti-inflammatory compounds than any other food, says Dr. Kerry Kuehl, assistant director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

Scott Jurek is a nice guy who exhibits none of the sanctimonious proselytizing that vegans sometimes do. He's also a guy who gave up a fast-food burger diet and runs what many consider to be obscenely long distances. How long? In 2010, he ran an astounding 165.7 miles (more than six marathons) in 24 hours to set a new U.S. record. His long list of running accomplishments has led to much praise, including Ultrarunning magazine three times naming him ultra-runner of the year. He also found time to write the new book "Eat & Run" with Steve Friedman (Houghton Mifflin)

American Grown The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America Michelle Obama Crown: 272 pp., $30 Michelle Obama can recall a time when she "had no idea that tomatoes didn't come in green plastic trays, covered by cellophane and that they could be any color other than pale red. " She's come a long way, and now she is working to bring the rest of us with her. Her efforts to garden on the White...

A 2-million-year old hominid from South Africa had a very unusual diet, an international team of researchers has found. Instead of living on grasses and wild animals from the nearby savannas, like modern humans and pre-humans that have previously been studied, Australopithecus sediba lived on bark, woody tissues, fruits and other plants found almost exclusively in forests, like modern chimpanzees. That diet may be one reason why the species died out, researchers said. A. sediba was first discovered in 2008 in a pit at the Malapa Cave about 30 miles north of Johannesburg.

Researchers who study nutrition say it's hard to complete studies like the one published earlier this week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., which showed that, after weight loss, dieters' metabolism slowed more when they ate a low-fat, high-carbohydrate weight maintenance plan than it did when they stuck to a low-glycemic index plan or, especially, a low-carb plan (see a link to our story on the research in the related items at left)....

To the rational mind, the notion of willingly depriving oneself of food for days on end seems illogical, at best. Basic biology, after all, dictates that calories are necessary to sustain everyday functioning and that low levels of, say, iron or potassium could throw off our physical health, possibly even dangerously so. And yet, extreme dietary cleanses seem to have gripped the imaginations of even the most practical among us. Somewhere along the...

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

"Mad Men" actress January Jones ate her placenta (to be fair, dried and made into a pill). Alicia Silverstone chews up veggies and deposits them mama-bird-style into her baby son's mouth. And model Gisele Bundchen says her diaper-free son was toilet trained at 6 months. So what do these parents know that your average sleep-deprived parent - who barely has time to shop for food, let alone chew it for their kids - doesn't? Here, experts weigh in on the evidence. Pre-masticating In a breakfast-time video, Silverstone chews up the vegetables in her miso soup.

Most of us are too plump and are overly fond of snacks, fast food - and food in general. So why did two lean young women who dine on smoothies and organic fruits and vegetables (how unimpeachable does that sound) seek help cleaning up their act? May Haduong, 33, and Frances Motiwalla, 34, just had this sense they were slaves to each passing fad (greens! organic! flaxseed! gluten-free!) and were building up their eating rules in a haphazard, unscientific way. "We've sort of made it up in our heads," Haduong says: whirring up slurries of kale, beet greens, frozen fruits and celery in the blender in their pint-sized kitchen twice a day (down to once a day when Motiwalla couldn't take it anymore)

In a new study examining diet, physical activity and obesity in prison populations, researchers at the University of Oxford in England have found that in most cases, male prisoners are less likely to be obese than men in the general population. Female prisoners, on the other hand, were more likely to be obese than other women - at least, in the U.S. and Australia. The findings, which were published Thursday in the journal Lancet (subscription required), reflect broader health disparities between advantaged and disadvantaged people, the researchers wrote.  They noted that in 2008, 36 million out of 57 million deaths worldwide resulted from non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and respiratory disease.