People who eat a diet rich in nuts, including peanuts, are less likely to die from heart disease or cancer, new research suggests.

The more nuts consumed, the greater the apparent benefit, according to the report. It included data from nurses and other health professionals who have been tracked since the 1980s.

Heart disease and cancer - the biggest killers in the U.S. - are responsible for more than one million annual deaths nationwide.

The International Tree Nut Council Nutrition Research and Education Foundation helped pay for the new report, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings dovetail with other research suggesting regularly eating nuts may lower the risk of common health problems such as heart disease, colon cancer and type 2 diabetes.

"Nuts used to be demonized because they're high in fat. Now, 20 years later, they're recognized as a healthful food," Jeffrey Blumberg said.

He is from the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston and wasn't part of the study team.

"It's just like coffee and eggs used to be demonized," Blumberg said. "Eggs used to be a heart attack in a shell. Nuts are high in fat, but they're high in good fats."

The new study - the largest to look at deaths - suggests the health benefits of nuts may translate to a lower risk of premature death, researchers said.

The variety of nut, including peanuts, which are actually legumes, did not seem to make a difference, senior author Dr. Charles Fuchs said.

"The benefit really seems to span across nuts," Fuchs, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said.

The two databases used in the analysis included about 76,000 women who are part of the ongoing Nurses' Health Study and 42,000 men who are regularly evaluated as part of the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The findings are based on questionnaires in which the volunteers periodically recalled their eating habits.

The researchers had to account for the fact that nut eaters tended to be healthier when it came to smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity, exercise habits and other elements of their diet, such as eating more fruits and vegetables.

Yet even when those factors were taken into account, they said, nut consumption seemed to be tied to a lower risk of early death.

During 30 years of the Nurses' Health Study, about 16,000 women died. About 11,000 men died over a 24-year period in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

Compared to people who never ate nuts, those who ate nuts once a week were 11 percent less likely to die during the studies and those who ate nuts every day were 20 percent less likely to die.

People who reported eating nuts at least five times per week were 29 percent less likely to die of heart disease, in particular, than those who avoided nuts. They were also 24 percent less likely to die of respiratory conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 11 percent less likely to die of cancer.

Nuts were not linked to fewer deaths from stroke, neurodegenerative disease, infection or kidney disease. Nor were they tied to a lower risk of dying from diabetes, even though some research has suggested nuts may have a benefit in that disease.

Fuchs said his personal recommendation is that people eat an ounce of nuts each day, although smaller amounts still seem to make a difference.

The study also suggests people who eat a lot of nuts are less likely to put on weight.

It's possible that people who like nuts tend to have a thinner body type, "but even after adjusting for lifestyle choices, we definitely see that people who eat nuts tend to be thinner and are less likely to be obese," Fuchs said.

It's not clear whether salted or spiced nuts are less beneficial than raw ones, the researchers noted.

Fuchs and his colleagues also cautioned that the study can't prove nuts were responsible for the lower risk of death. "However," they said, "our data are consistent with a wealth of existing observational and clinical-trial data in supporting the health benefits of nut consumption for many chronic diseases."

A new study has found that women who go to sleep and woke up at same time every day had lower body fat.

Brigham Young University exercise science professor Bruce Bailey studied more than 300 women from two major Western US universities over the course of several weeks and found that those with the best sleeping habits had healthier weight.

The study found that getting less than 6.5 or more than 8.5 hours of sleep per night is associated with higher body fat and that quality of sleep is important for body composition.

Women in the study were first assessed for body composition, and then were given an activity tracker to record their movements during the day and their sleep patterns at night. Researchers tracked sleep patterns of the participants (ages 17-26) for one week.

The most surprising finding from the study, according to the researchers, was the link between bed time and wake time consistency and body weight.

Study participants who went to bed and woke up at, or around the same time each day had lower body fat. Those with more than 90 minutes of variation in sleep and wake time during the week had higher body fat than those with less than 60 minutes of variation.

Wake time was particularly linked to body fat: Those who woke up at the same time each morning had lower body fat. Staying up late and even sleeping in may be doing more harm than good, Bailey said.

Bailey related consistent sleep patterns to having good sleep hygiene. When sleep hygiene is altered, it can influence physical activity patterns, and affect some of the hormones related to food consumption contributing to excess body fat.

Bailey and his team also found there was a sweet spot for amount of sleep: Those who slept between 8 and 8.5 hours per night had the lowest body fat.

The study findings have been published online in the American Journal of Health Promotion.

You may want to reconsider that late afternoon trip to Starbucks.

A new study from the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows that consuming caffeine even six hours before bedtime can still cause significant sleep disruptions.

In a study conducted at Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich., researchers studied the way that caffeine exposure affected the sleep habits of 12 healthy sleepers.

Participants were given three pills a day and instructed to take one pill six hours before bedtime, one pill three hours before bedtime and one pill right before they went to sleep. Each day, only one of the pills contained 400 mg of caffeine, which is equivalent to the amount of caffeine found in two to three cups of coffee.

Researchers then measured participants' sleep using both subjective analyses and in-home sleep monitors that tracked their brain activity.

Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that caffeine consumption appeared to cause significant sleep disruptions, regardless of when it was consumed during the day.

"We expected to see a time-sleep effect. We expected to see it at all time points, but we thought it would be more pronounced the closer to bedtime," study author Thomas Roth, founder of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, told FoxNews.com. "(But) it was pretty comparable at all time points."

In fact, consuming caffeine six hours before bedtime was associated with a one-hour reduction in total sleep time, the researchers reported.

"One hour of loss sleep - that's huge." Roth said. "The average sleeping pill you take will increase sleep for 30 minutes. This decreases sleep for about an hour. If you did this on a chronic basis, you'd become pretty sleep deprived."

Though researchers didn't examine why caffeine has such a pronounced effect on sleep, Roth suspects it has something to do with the way caffeine effects adenosine - a neurotransmitter that builds up in the brain during waking hours and decreases with sleep.

"Adenosine is what builds up in your brain to increase sleep pressure and (caffeine) may be negating that," Roth said.

Overall, Roth said that chronic sleep deprivation can cause a number of ill health effects, including cognitive impairment during the day and negative mood.

Though heavy caffeine drinkers may be more immune to the stimulant's effects, people who drink a moderate amount of coffee should avoid it later in the day.

Scientists have discovered recent genetic mutations in a malaria parasite and have found a duplication of a gene known to enable the parasite to infect red blood cells and two possible additional components to a more complex red cell invasion mechanism.

To learn the functions of the mutations, and whether the parasite is evolving around a natural defence, Peter A. Zimmerman, professor of international health, biology and genetics at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, and David Serre, a scientific staff member of the Genomic Medicine Institute at Lerner and assistant professor of genomics at Case Western Reserve, have received a 3.5 million dollars grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health. They will begin their field study in early 2014.

Researchers have long thought that P. vivax infects a person one way: a protein on the parasite, called the Duffy binding protein, latches onto a Duffy receptor on the surface of the person's red blood cell and works itself through the membrane.

P. vivax does not grow well in the laboratory, so to try to understand how the parasite lives and operates; the researchers gathered samples from malaria patients and focused on its genome.

They found a duplication of the Duffy binding protein in half of 189 P. vivax infection samples taken in Madagascar. Other researchers' prior efforts to sequence the P. vivax genome missed the duplication but all indications are it's a recent change, Serre said.

The researchers suspect the mutation is spreading from Madagascar through travellers. They found the duplication in less than 10 percent of samples from Cambodia and Sudan.

"Binding proteins and receptors are locks and keys," Zimmerman said. "If the parasite has one key and there's one lock, you may be able to block that. But if it has more keys and there are more locks, there are multiple ways in."

The researchers say the duplication may be a cause of the growing infections among Duffy negative people, but it's too early to tell.

The study is scheduled to be published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Disease.

Federal health officials have agreed to import a meningitis vaccine approved in Europe and Australia but not the U.S. as officials at Princeton University consider measures to stop the spread of the disease on the Ivy League campus.

The Food and Drug Administration this week approved importing Bexsero for possible use on Princeton's campus, said Barbara Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Princeton officials confirmed the school's seventh case of meningitis in 2013 this week and a spokesman said trustees will discuss the issue this weekend.

No vaccine for use against the type B meningococcal bacteria which caused the cases at Princeton is available in the U.S., Reynolds said, adding that the decision to receive the vaccine would be optional if Princeton and CDC officials agree to offer it to students.

Bacterial meningitis can cause swelling of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. The disease is fairly rare in the United States. Those who get it develop symptoms quickly and can die in a couple of days. Survivors can suffer mental disabilities, hearing loss and paralysis.

The bacteria are spread by coughing, sneezing and kissing, and most cases occur in previously healthy children and young adults. The disease can easily spread in crowded conditions, like dorm rooms. All students living in dorms are required by state law to have a licensed meningitis vaccine, but it does not protect against type B.

The school is telling students to wash their hands, cover their coughs and not to share items such as drinking glasses and eating utensils.