A few bits of news

As I haven't updated in a while here's a few health related stories from our friends in the media biz.

US senators have passed the final Senate version of a historic healthcare reform bill.

The bill aims to cover 31m uninsured Americans and could lead to the biggest change in US healthcare in decades.

President Barack Obama welcomed it as offering "real and meaningful" reform, saying it was the most important piece of social legislation since the 1930s.

"With today's vote, we are now incredibly close to making health insurance reform a reality in this country."

As a nation, the US spent some $2.2tn (£1.36tn) on healthcare in 2007. That amounts to 16.2% of GDP, nearly twice the average of other rich, industrialised countries.

As costs have spiralled, millions of Americans have found themselves unable to afford health insurance and the cost to the government of providing care for the poor and elderly has risen hugely.

Tea and coffee drinkers have a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a large body of evidence shows.

And the protection may not be down to caffeine since decaf coffee has the greatest effect, say researchers in Archives of Internal Medicine.

They looked at 18 separate studies involving nearly 500,000 people.

This analysis revealed that people who drink three or four cups of coffee or tea a day cut their risk by a fifth or more, say researchers.

The same amount of decaffeinated coffee had an even bigger effect, lowering risk by a third.

Fancy a cuppa?

Think small on new year's resolutions

Millions of people fail to fulfil their new year's resolutions because of a faulty approach, suggests a new study.

Prof. Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire conducted a study of 700 people who aimed to achieve several resolutions, such as losing weight, quitting smoking and improving their job qualifications.

He found that only 22 per cent were successful. Those who used commonly recommended approaches such as focusing on the negative implications of not succeeding, removing temptation, having a role model and visualizing about being successful, tended to be unsuccessful.

"Many of these ideas are frequently recommended by self-help experts, but our results suggest that they simply don't work," Wiseman said in a release.

Conversely, people who attained their goals thought small, rather than big, dividing up the steps to achieving their goals into small manageable chunks.