The Checkup: Going Vegetarian May Cut Heart Disease Risk by a Third

All hail veggies!

At the risk of belaboring the point … you should really think about going vegetarian—even for just a day or two a week. Why? A new study found that vegetarians are 32 percent less likely than meat eaters to wind up in the hospital with cardiovascular disease. One-third! Less likely! That’s something to hang your hat on. The mega-study included 45,000 subjects from England and Scotland, a third of whom were vegetarians. Researchers found that in addition to having a significantly lower heart-disease risk, vegetarians also had lower cholesterol and blood pressure levels than non-veggies. “Vegetarians also tended to be slimmer and there were fewer cases of diabetes, but these two factors were not found to significantly affect the study results,” HealthDay reports. And while the study has its critics—among them, a doctor who points out that the vegetarians in the study were, on average, 10 years younger than the meat-eaters, which could skew the results—there’s really no downside to eating more broccoli, carrots and kale, right? I say just do it.

• Um, guys? You may need to throw out everything you thought you knew about weight loss. A new study found that some of the most popular assumptions about weight loss—that small changes in diet or exercise can result in steady weight loss; that slow, gradual weight loss is better than rapid, dramatic weight loss—are myths. Read more here.

• I’m loving this: Our friends over at GPhilly wrote about a study which found that “out gay and lesbian people are mentally and physically healthier than straight people or those who have yet to come out of the closet.” More here.