Willpower apparently can be bought. The chance to win or lose $20 a month enticed dieters in a yearlong study to drop an average of 9 pounds (4 kilograms)— four times more weight than others who were not offered dough to pass up the doughnuts.

Many employers, insurers and Internet programs dangle dollars to try to change bad habits like smoking or not exercising, but most studies have found this doesn't work very well or for very long.

A fund of millions of dollars raised to help malnourished children in western India has been diverted to maintain public buses, a report said on Friday.

The "Child Nutrition Surcharge" was set up 16 years ago to collect a small percentage of each bus ticket fare in major cities in Maharashtra state, where thousands of children die from malnutrition each year.

The Health Ministry announced on Thursday that a truck smuggling medication from Turkey has been seized in the Bekaa.

It said that the Internal Security Forces had stopped the truck at a checkpoint near the Bekaa town of Zahleh where it discovered its load.

Aid agencies and governments must tackle the taboos surrounding menstruation as sidelining the issue undermines the quality of life of women and girls, chiefly in poor nations, a U.N. body said Wednesday.

Poor education about menstruation, lack of access to sanitary napkins and painkillers for cramps, and inadequate washing and disposal facilities have a far-reaching impact on schooling, work and health, the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council said.

A high-salt diet may be a risk factor for autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS), according to three papers published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

Two of the studies showed that salt can induce the production of aggressive cells involved in autoimmune disease development in mice and humans, while a third indicated that mice on high-salt diets develop a type of disease similar to human MS.

Scientists said Thursday they had, for the first time, helped women with severe anorexia through electrodes implanted into their brains.

The technique is in an experimental phase and only some patients had improved, but the treatment showed promise, they wrote in the Lancet medical journal.

At a small and peaceful clinic on the outskirts of Yangon, 20 volunteers tend to 300 HIV patients abandoned by a health care system allowed to crumble during decades of brutal military rule in Myanmar.

In a country whose rulers long prioritized military spending over the needs of their people, these men, women and children have found a refuge thanks to the work of a member of Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party.

Want to know your chances of dying in the next 10 years? Here are some bad signs: getting winded walking several blocks, smoking, and having trouble pushing a chair across the room.

That's according to a "mortality index" developed by San Francisco researchers for people older than 50.

U.S. researchers on Tuesday published incredibly detailed images of the human brain as part of an international project aimed at uncovering how brain architecture influences personality.

The five-year "Human Connectome Project" or HCP -- being conducted at 10 research centers in the U.S. and Europe -- will use advanced brain imaging technology to collect vast amounts of data on healthy adults and make it freely available to researchers worldwide.

Despite six decades of free medical care and widespread health campaigns, Britons are among the unhealthiest people in Western Europe, a new study says.

International researchers analyzed the country's rates of sickness and death from 1990 to 2010 in comparison to those of 15 other Western European countries in addition to Australia, Canada and the U.S. Experts described the U.K. results as "startling" and said Britain was failing to address underlying health risks in its population, including rising rates of high blood pressure, obesity and drug and alcohol abuse.