You all are aware of the plethora of health benefits that regular exercise brings. Now add enhanced intelligence to that list.

According to a new study, fitness has a long-term effect on a wide range of cognitive abilities like reasoning, remembering, understanding and problem solving.

For John Ratey, a neuropsychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, regular physical activity may also play a vital role in enhancing brainpower as we reach an advanced age.

"It's a really amazing effect," added David Raichlen, a biological anthropologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a report that appeared in the Washington Post.

Raichlen is currently investigating whether our ancestors' athleticism may have accelerated the evolution of their intelligence millions of years ago.

Another study, which followed a group of nearly 1,500 people for 20 years, showed that those who exercised at least twice a week during middle age were much less likely to develop dementia by the time they reached their 60s and 70s.

"People really enjoy that euphoric aspect of a runner's high and the clarity of mind you get from a routine workout," Brian Christie, a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, was quoted as saying.

Although there are fewer studies done on younger people, the available evidence suggests that physical activity enhances brain health at every stage of life, says the report.

What kind of exercise is ideal? An aerobic workout is essential, but it doesn't have to be too strenuous. Even gentle activities, such as taking a walk a few times a week, worked wonders for the elderly, concluded the report.

So long as they don't have nut allergies themselves, pregnant women shouldn't be afraid that eating nuts might trigger allergies in their child, according to a large new study.

In fact, when women ate nuts more than five times a month during pregnancy, their kids had markedly lower risk of nut allergies compared to kids whose mothers avoided nuts, researchers found.

"The take-home message is that the previous concerns or fears of the ingestion of nuts during pregnancy causing subsequent peanut or nut allergy is really unfounded," Dr. Michael Young said.

Young is the study's senior author and an attending physician in allergy and immunology at Boston Children's Hospital.

He cautioned that pregnant women shouldn't start eating peanuts and tree nuts to prevent their children from developing nut allergies, however.

"Even though our study showed a reduction of risk, I really have to emphasize that the way our study was done only shows an association," he said.

He and his colleagues write in JAMA Pediatrics that between 1997 and 2010 the prevalence of peanut allergies tripled to 1.4 percent of U.S. children.

For the new study, the researchers used data from a national study of female nurses between the ages of 24 and 44 years old. Starting in 1991, the women periodically reported what they ate.

The researchers then combined information on the women's diets from around the time of their pregnancies with data from another study of their children.

In 2009 the women completed a questionnaire that asked whether their children had any food allergies. Of 8,205 children in the study, 308 had food allergies, including 140 who were allergic to peanuts or tree nuts.

Tree nuts include walnuts, almonds, pistachios, cashews, pecans, hazelnuts, macadamias and Brazil nuts.

Overall, the researchers found that eating nuts while pregnant was not tied to an increased risk of nut allergies among children. On the contrary, the more nuts women reported eating during pregnancy, the less likely their children were to have nut allergies.

About 1.5 percent of children of women who ate less than one serving of nuts per month during pregnancy developed nut allergies. That compared to about 0.5 percent of children of women who ate five or more servings per week.

In other words, kids whose mothers ate nuts most often had about a third of the risk compared to kids whose mothers ate nuts least often.

The exception was children of women who themselves had a history of nut allergies. In those cases, when women ate nuts five or more times a week during pregnancy, their children had about two and a half times the risk of nut allergies compared to the kids of allergic mothers who avoided nuts during pregnancy.

"Certainly this is reassurance that eating nuts during pregnancy will not increase your child's risk of allergy," Dr. Loralei Thornburg said. "In fact, it may be tied to a decreased risk of nut allergies."

Thornburg was not involved in the new study but is a high-risk pregnancy expert at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.

However, "if there is a strong family history at all or if the mother herself has any food allergy, then she should go talk to her physician, because there is not clear data on that," Dr. Ruchi Gupta said.

Gupta is an associate professor of pediatrics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and an expert on food allergies and asthma.

In an editorial accompanying the new study, Gupta wrote that it will take additional studies and research to understand why a growing number of children are developing food allergies and how to prevent it.

"What I do like about the study is it adds evidence that mothers-to-be should eat whatever they wish and not worry that the consumption of certain foods will result in allergies," she said.

A team of researchers has developed a new vaccine that protects against lethal pneumonia caused by Staphylococcus aureus (staph) bacteria, including drug-resistant strains like MRSA.

The new vaccine by the research team, led by Patrick Schlievert, professor and chair of microbiology in the University of Iowa's Carver College of Medicine, targets toxins that are made and secreted by staph bacteria.

The researchers believed a vaccine that blocked the action of these toxins might prevent the serious illness caused by the bacteria.

Using an animal model that closely resembles human staph infection the researchers showed that vaccination against three staph toxins provided almost complete protection against staph infections.

The vaccinated animals were protected from disease even when they were infected with very high doses of bacteria.

Furthermore, not only did the vaccine protect the animals from dying, but seven days after vaccination there were no disease-causing bacteria remaining in the animals' lungs.

"Our study suggests that vaccination against these toxins may provide protection against all strains of staph. If we can translate this finding into an effective vaccine for people it could potentially prevent millions of cases of serious and milder skin and soft tissue infections yearly," Schlievert said.

The team also found that passive immunization- using serum from vaccinated animals to immunize other animals- was successful. This finding suggests that antibodies induced by the vaccination are the protective factor.

The study is published in the Journal of Infectious Disease.

A new study has revealed that dietary fibre or fibre-rich foods are associated with lower risk of heart disease.

Researchers at the University of Leeds reviewed literature published since 1990 in healthy populations concerning dietary fibre intake and CVD risk. They took data from six electronic databases. Cohorts of data were used from the US, Europe, Japan and Australia.

They looked at the following fibre intake: total, insoluble (whole grains, potato skins etc), soluble (legumes, nuts, oats, barley etc), cereal, fruit, vegetable and other sources.

Results from analyses of total, insoluble, fruit and vegetable fibre intake showed that the likelihood of a CVD or CHD event steadily lowers with increasing intake.

In soluble fibre, a higher reduction was seen in CVD risk than CHD risk and for cereal fibre, the reduced risk of CHD was stronger than the association with CVD.

A significantly lower risk of both CVD and CHD was observed with every additional 7g per day of fibre consumed.

The researchers concluded that "diets high in fibre, specifically from cereal or vegetable sources are significantly associated with lower risk of CHD and CVD and reflect recommendations to increase intake."

Greater intake from fruit fibre was associated with lower CVD risk. They recommend further work on the association with soluble or insoluble types of fibre.

New guidelines suggest that people over 60 can have a higher blood pressure than previously recommended.

Until now, people were told to strive for blood pressures below 140/90, with some taking multiple drugs to achieve that goal.

But the guidelines committee, which spent five years reviewing evidence, concluded that the goal for people over 60 should be a systolic pressure of less than 150. And the diastolic goal should remain less than 90.

Systolic blood pressure, the top number, indicates the pressure on blood vessels when the heart contracts. Diastolic, the bottom number, refers to pressure on blood vessels when the heart relaxes between beats.

Essentially, the committee determined that there was not strong evidence for the blood pressure targets that had been guiding treatment and that there were risks associated with the medications used to bring pressures down.

The committee, composed of 17 academics, was tasked with updating guidelines last re-examined a decade ago.

The group added that people over 60 who are taking drugs and have lowered their blood pressure to below 150 can continue taking the medications if they are not experiencing side effects.

But, it cautioned, although efforts to lower blood pressure have had a remarkable effect, reducing the incidence of strokes and heart disease, there is a difference between lowering blood pressure with drugs and having lower pressure naturally.

The report has been published online in The Journal of the American Medical Association.