Trying to lose weight? Skip the gym

For a long time, I've been a voice in the wilderness on the issue of exercise. I've always been stunned that the "work out" fad that kicked in back in the 70s has hung on for so long. Most exercise programs are a waste of time, largely because most of the people who start a work out program rarely lose weight.

Finally, I have some company here in the wilderness: Susan B. Roberts, a nutritionist from Tufts University in Boston and author of The Instinct Diet. Roberts says that in spite of what you see on those gym commercials, there's not a lot of evidence to support the idea that an exercise program is the True Path to weight loss.

Roberts and her team examined exercise and weight studies published between 1969 and 2005, and found that, on average, a one-hour-per-day exercise program will only result in a weight loss of about six pounds over several months.

Not much, right? And yet for years, we've all been getting a heavy guilt trip (especially from the $4.7 billion-per-year fitness industry) that we need to get our butts off the couch and into the gym. But statistics that I've pointed out to you over the years show that in an average year, millions of exercise fanatics that work out actually end up working themselves in to the emergency room.

"Feel free to kill yourself in the gym if it makes you feel good," Roberts says. "But it isn't essential, and by itself doesn't do much. All the evidence suggests that exercise is less important than what goes in your mouth, and when."

Roberts claims that 85 percent of the people who've participated in her no-exercise weight loss program lost between 10 and 50 pounds without touching a dumb bell or stepping on a treadmill - and they kept the weight off for at least a year.

If you're trying to shed a few pounds, just do what I've been telling you to do all along. Eat more protein, cut out the sugar and carbs, and you'll drop those extra inches in no time. No gym necessary.

The one-drop alternative to invasive biopsies

For years, I've written about the fact that cancer screening methods have lagged dangerously behind advancements in cancer treatment. From the wildly inaccurate PSA test for prostate cancer, to the hit-or-miss mammogram - both of which can lead to invasive and damaging biopsy procedures - people have literally been dying for better ways to find cancer.

And the answer could be closer than we think. There's a new technology developed by Stanford University researchers that could determine whether or not a person has cancer by examining a single drop of blood.

This incredible breakthrough is a machine capable of separating cancer proteins by finding their electric charge. It might not just change the way cancers are diagnosed - it could also change the way they are treated.

"The standard way we measure if a treatment is working is to wait several weeks to see if the tumor mass shrinks," said a clinical instructor at Stanford Medical School's oncology division. "It would really be a leap forward if we could detect what is happening at a cellular level."

It's still early days on this research, and it will likely take years of continual testing before this method becomes common. I just hope it gets hurried along. This is one piece of technology that's sorely needed.