It is said that children pay for the mistakes their parents make. Whether this saying meant responsibilities, debts or mistakes, it certainly holds true for health. Whenever you see advertisements to not smoke and quit it, a common theme is urging people to quit smoking for their loved ones.

It’s a well-known fact that smoking is harmful to your health. A new study, however, shows that the damage from smoking can reach across generations. If a man was exposed to secondhand smoke as a child, his own children may have weaker lungs and a higher risk of developing a serious lung disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

How Much Risk Does Passive Smoking Put Children In?

Higher Risk of Weak Lungs

The study found that children whose fathers were exposed to passive smoke as kids had a 56% higher chance of having weaker-than-normal lungs throughout their lives. This is a very significant finding because it shows a direct link across generations. It means that the harmful effects of smoke can be carried from a father's childhood into his child's adulthood.

Early Decline in Lung Health

The researchers also found that these children were twice as likely to experience a rapid decline in their lung function early in life. This means their lungs started getting worse at a younger age than expected, putting them on a faster path toward serious breathing problems later on.

Increased COPD Risk

COPD is a serious and life-threatening lung disease. The study showed that the children of fathers who were exposed to passive smoke had a doubled risk of developing COPD by the time they reached their 50s. This specific finding needs more research to be confirmed, but it highlights a concerning long-term health risk.

Can You Pass Down Decreased Lung Capacity?

The study found that the risk is even greater when a child is exposed to smoke from two generations. If a man was around smoke as a child, and then he also allowed his own child to be exposed, that child faced a powerful "double whammy." The study found that these children were twice as likely to have below-average lung function compared to a child who wasn't exposed to smoke from either their father or their own environment.

Researchers believe the period before puberty is an especially sensitive time for boys. During these years, exposure to harmful substances like tobacco smoke might change how their genes work. These changes could then be passed down to their children. This study is groundbreaking because it’s one of the first to show that a father’s exposure to passive smoke—not just if he was a smoker himself—can have a lasting, harmful effect on his child’s health.

How Does This Affect Public Health?

This research highlights a major public health concern. Since so many children today are still exposed to secondhand smoke, the negative effects could be passed down through families for generations. The researchers say that to protect future health, it's crucial for fathers who were exposed to smoke as children to avoid smoking around their own kids. By doing so, they can help break this cycle of inherited harm and protect the health of their children and grandchildren.

Music has a way to make you feel different kinds of emotions. Whether it is calm, excited or even sad. We all have playlists for different moments, whether it's for a workout, a commute, or a quiet night at home. Music isn't just background noise; it's a tool we use to match or change our mood, and it can even influence how we feel physically. Having playlists according to our routine is normal as well as having playlists dedicated to occasions like our birthdays and anniversaries. However, did you know, you could also have an anti-motion sickness.

A new study suggests that listening to certain kinds of music can help you feel better when you get motion sickness. Specifically, joyful and soft music were found to be most effective at relieving symptoms and making the travel experience more pleasant. Scientists found that these types of tunes help calm the brain and reduce the physical symptoms of feeling sick. This discovery offers a simple and easy-to-use solution for people who suffer from motion sickness, whether on a car ride, a boat, or even in a flight simulator.

What Is Motion Sickness?

Motion sickness happens when there's a disconnect between what your eyes see and what your inner ear feels. For example, in a car, your eyes see the inside of the vehicle, which appears still, but your inner ear feels the motion of the turns and bumps. This mismatch confuses your brain and can cause you to feel nauseous, dizzy, and just plain sick. This is becoming a bigger issue with the rise of self-driving cars, where passengers aren't always focused on the road ahead and are more likely to experience this visual-vestibular conflict.

What Kind Of Music Helps With Motion Sickness?

To figure out how music affects motion sickness, scientists created a driving simulator. This allowed them to safely make people feel motion sickness by creating the same visual and balance disconnect that happens in a real car. They then had the participants listen to different types of music—joyful, sad, stirring, and soft—and measured their brain activity using a special cap that reads brain signals (EEG). They also asked the participants how they felt. The study’s setup was designed to find a clear link between brain activity and the type of music listened to.

The study found a strong link between brain activity and motion sickness. By analyzing brain signals, they were able to accurately predict when someone was feeling sick. When they looked at the effect of music, they found:

• Soft and joyful music were the most effective. People reported feeling significantly better—up to 57% better with soft music and 56% better with joyful music.
• Sad music actually seemed to make things worse, performing even less effectively than a group that just rested with no music.
• Stirring music had mixed results; it helped according to brain data but not in what people said they felt.

The study concludes that playing the right kind of music could be a simple, non-drug solution for motion sickness. However, the researchers noted that more studies are needed with a larger and more diverse group of people to confirm these findings in real-life situations.

Food is one of the best ways to de-stress when you are working under pressure and are worried about things in your life. However, relying only on food to cheer you up can lead you down a path that can increase your blood sugar and put your health at risk.

High blood sugar is much more common than people realize, in 2022 adults over the age of 18 years were living with high blood sugar. What’s surprising is that a lot of them did not even know they have high blood sugar. However, why is high blood sugar a cause of concern?

What Happens When Blood Sugar Is High?

When blood sugar levels stay high for a long time or get very high, it can cause serious, permanent damage to your body. This can lead to nerve damage in your hands and feet, vision problems, and even a life-threatening condition called diabetic ketoacidosis. If you have high blood sugar, your doctor might have you test for ketones, as a high level of these can be a sign of this dangerous condition.

Symptoms of high blood sugar usually appear gradually and may not become noticeable until your blood sugar levels are quite high. The most common signs to watch for are:

• Feeling very thirsty.
• Peeing a lot.
• Feeling weak or tired.
• Having blurry vision.
• Losing weight unexpectedly.

14 Day Routine That Can Lower Your Blood Sugar

For people with diabetes, several things can cause blood sugar levels to rise. These include being sick or feeling stressed, eating too many foods that are high in sugar or starch, not being as active as you normally are etc.

According to the post, this 14-day plan to help manage blood sugar without relying solely on medication. These tips focus on diet, physical activity, and timing to help you control your body's blood sugar levels.

Avoid Sugary Drinks and Refined Grains

Cut out drinks like sodas, juices, and sweetened teas, as they cause a rapid spike in blood sugar. Similarly, processed carbs like white bread and white rice break down quickly into sugar. Instead, choose whole grains.

Eat Cinnamon Daily

Adding just a half-teaspoon of cinnamon to your morning tea or food can help improve your body's sensitivity to insulin, which is the hormone that moves sugar from your blood into your cells.

Start Meals with Fiber-Rich Salad

Eating a salad first can help slow down the digestion of the rest of your meal. The fiber in the salad creates a kind of protective barrier in your gut, which keeps your blood sugar from spiking too quickly after you eat.

Choose Complex Carbs

Instead of simple carbs, like those found in sweets and white flour, choose complex carbs. These are found in foods like whole grains, vegetables, and beans. They are rich in fiber, which helps your body absorb sugar more slowly and steadily.

Replace Sugar with Natural Sweeteners

Try using natural, zero-calorie sweeteners like stevia or monk fruit instead of regular sugar. These can satisfy your sweet tooth without affecting your blood sugar levels.

Eat Small, Frequent Meals

Eating three big meals can lead to large blood sugar spikes. A better approach is to eat several smaller meals throughout the day. This helps keep your blood sugar levels more stable and prevents extreme highs and lows.

Physical Activity and Other Habits

Walk 20 Minutes After Every Meal

A short walk after you eat can do wonders. Physical activity helps your muscles use up the sugar in your bloodstream for energy, which prevents blood sugar levels from rising too high.

Drink Bitter Gourd Juice

This traditional remedy is often used to help manage blood sugar. Drinking it three times per week may support your body's ability to use glucose effectively.

Scientists have long been puzzled over how the brain clears away its own waste. Unlike the rest of the body, which relies on the lymphatic system to carry waste from cells into circulation, the brain appeared to have no such mechanism. That mystery shifted about 12 years ago when researchers discovered the glymphatic system, a network that acts as the brain’s built-in cleaning service.

The glymphatic system works by circulating cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) through the brain’s tissues. This fluid enters the spaces between brain cells, collects waste, and carries it out along large veins. In animal studies, particularly in mice, the system appears most active during sleep. That discovery suggested that sleep might be essential for brain detoxification, and disrupted rest could interfere with waste clearance.

Among the most important toxins flushed out by the glymphatic system is amyloid beta (Aβ), a protein that, when accumulated, forms sticky plaques in the brain. These plaques, along with tangles of tau protein, are a defining feature of Alzheimer’s disease—the most common cause of dementia worldwide.

The idea that better sleep helps the brain clean itself is more than a scientific curiosity. It may help explain why people who consistently struggle with poor sleep face higher risks of dementia.

In humans, levels of amyloid beta in cerebrospinal fluid rise during waking hours and drop during sleep, suggesting that rest is when the brain “takes out the trash.” In one striking experiment, researchers kept healthy adults awake for a single night. Just 24 hours of sleep deprivation increased amyloid beta in the hippocampus, the brain region essential for memory and one of the first to show damage in Alzheimer’s disease.

Still, questions remain. While several mouse studies indicate the glymphatic system is most active at night, other recent experiments suggest it may work differently depending on the time of day or even the species. The debate highlights how much more we need to learn about how this system functions in humans.

How Do Sleep Disorders Increase Risk of Dementia?

Not all sleep is equal. Short-term sleep loss is harmful, but chronic sleep problems can be particularly damaging to brain health.

Sleep Apnoea

Sleep apnoea, where breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep, deprives the brain of oxygen and fragments rest. Both oxygen deprivation and chronic sleep disruption are thought to contribute to toxin build-up in the brain. Importantly, studies show that patients treated for sleep apnoea—often with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines—see greater clearance of amyloid beta. This suggests that treatment may help restore the brain’s waste-disposal rhythm.

Insomnia

Insomnia, defined as difficulty falling or staying asleep, has also been linked to higher dementia risk. While the association is clear, the mechanism is less so. Does insomnia accelerate amyloid build-up? Could treatment reverse the trend? Researchers are only beginning to explore whether therapies—such as orexin receptor antagonists, a new class of sleep drugs—might improve toxin clearance.

Untreated sleep disorders don’t just leave you tired—they may be undermining your brain’s long-term health.

Can Sleep Prevent Dementia?

While early findings are promising, science isn’t yet ready to declare sleep a cure for dementia. What researchers do know is that sleep deprivation can rapidly alter amyloid levels in the brain, and chronic sleep disorders such as apnoea and insomnia are associated with a higher risk of developing dementia. Treating sleep apnoea appears to improve amyloid clearance, though evidence regarding the effects of insomnia treatment remains limited.

What remains uncertain is whether improving sleep directly reduces dementia risk. Large, long-term clinical studies are still needed to confirm the link. Researchers are actively pursuing this question, measuring proteins like amyloid beta and tau in blood and spinal fluid across sleep-wake cycles, in both healthy individuals and those with sleep disorders.

The global dementia burden is growing. Alzheimer’s and related dementias currently affect more than 55 million people worldwide, with cases expected to triple by 2050. While scientists race to develop new drugs, lifestyle measures—such as improving sleep—are emerging as powerful, accessible tools for prevention.

If better sleep helps the glymphatic system flush out harmful proteins, prioritizing rest may be one of the simplest ways to protect long-term brain health. That means:

• Maintaining a consistent sleep schedule.
• Addressing sleep disorders like apnoea with medical guidance.
• Seeking help if insomnia is chronic.

While the science continues to evolve, the advice remains practical: treat sleep as essential, not optional.

The glymphatic system is a reminder that the brain, like the body, needs maintenance. Just as poor diet, smoking, or lack of exercise take their toll, chronic sleep disruption may leave toxins lingering in the brain, setting the stage for cognitive decline.

The exciting part is that this field of research is still in its infancy. Scientists are mapping the biology of how the brain cleans itself and testing new ways to boost that process. Whether through targeted drugs, therapies for sleep disorders, or simply protecting natural sleep cycles, the future may bring strategies to slow or even prevent dementia.