Could this type of cheese protect your bones? Plus, global warming may mean unfit kids, and more health news

Enjoying just two slices of Jarlsberg cheese every day may help stave off osteoporosis, a small Norwegian study suggests.

The protective effect of cheese on bone-thinning appears to be an exclusive benefit of Jarlsberg, and a mere 2 ounces a day seems to be enough to protect bone health, the investigators reported.

“Jarlsberg cheese might have a prophylactic effect on osteopenia and metabolic diseases,” said lead researcher Dr. Helge Einar Lundberg, from Skjetten Medical Center in Skjetten. “This has to be further investigated in a long-term study on a larger population of elderly females and men at risk of developing osteoporosis.”

While a plant-based diet may be associated with lower bone mineral density and increased fracture risk, there might be a way to counteract that: pumping iron.

New Austrian research shows that vegans who lift weights or do strength training have stronger bones than vegans who only do other forms of exercise such as biking or swimming.

“Veganism is a global trend with strongly increasing numbers of people worldwide adhering to a purely plant-based diet,” said Dr. Christian Muschitz, of St. Vincent Hospital Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna.

A daily hamburger might raise the risk of developing heart disease, but not necessarily for the reasons people often think, new research suggests.

The study of nearly 4,000 older Americans found what many have before: People who ate a lot of red meat had a heightened risk of heart disease and stroke.

But there was no evidence that the link was due to a traditional culprit: elevated blood levels of “bad” cholesterol.

Instead, researchers traced the risk, in part, to particular substances produced by the gut microbiome — the trillions of bacteria that reside in the digestive tract.

Anyone who has ever had a kidney stone never wants a repeat of the blinding pain that comes when it passes. Now, a new study maps out a diet that can help guard against that.

The cornerstones of that diet include eating plenty of foods that contain potassium, as well as a few servings of low-fat dairy daily, to get enough calcium. High-potassium fruits and veggies that could help include bananas, oranges, grapefruits, apricots, mushrooms, peas, cucumbers, zucchini, and melons such as cantaloupe and honeydew.

To arrive at those recommendations, researchers from the Mayo Clinic used data from questionnaires completed by kidney stone patients between 2009 and 2018.

Children are not as physically fit as their parents were when they were kids, and this will likely harm them as the Earth warms, new research claims.

The findings are based on a comprehensive review of more than 150 studies that looked at how children maintain physical activity, exercise and cope with heat, as well as how this might change as global temperatures rise. The research was published Aug. 5 in the journal Temperature.

“Fitter adults are better able to tolerate higher temperatures, due to a combination of physiological, behavioral and psychological factors,” said Shawnda Morrison, an environmental exercise physiologist at Slovenia’s University of Ljubljana.