What is it about the color red that appeals to men with high testosterone counts? Or, what is it about the color blue that doesn’t? A news release from the Association for Psychological Science reports that researchers at the University of Sunderland recruited 73 men, who were told only that they would be competing against each other and that their performances would be placed on a leaderboard. The men, whose testosterone levels were checked with saliva tests, were given the option of wearing either a red or blue symbol to represent them in the table and completed the competitive tasks. They also answered questionnaires about personal reasons may have affected their color choice. The researchers found that men who chose red had higher baseline testosterone levels, and they rated their color as having higher levels of characteristics such as dominance and aggression, than men who chose blue. And no, as is routinely demonstrated by the Red Sox, color choice does not influence performance.

Researchers are still miles away from telling us why some people get cancer and others don’t, but a new study conducted at the University of Vermont suggests that fitness in middle age may lower the likelihood of at lease some cancers later in life. HealthDay reports that researchers studied more than 17,000 men who had a single cardiovascular fitness assessment as part of a preventive health checkup when they were 50, on average. The men, whose fitness was gauged by walking on a treadmill, were categorized into five groups, from lowest fitness level to highest. In a follow-up study 20 to 25 years later, the researchers learned how many and which of them had suffered from lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and prostate cancer. They found that 2,332 men developed prostate cancer, 276 developed colorectal cancer and 277 developed lung cancer. They also found that the men who had been most fit had a 68 percent lower risk of lung cancer and a 38 percent lower risk of colorectal cancer when compared to the least fit. Prostate cancer risk, curiously, did not decline with increasing fitness, but the risk of death from it did. The researchers found that even a small improvement in fitness helped: a 50-year-old man who increased fitness so he could last three more minutes on the treadmill could reduce cancer death risk by 14 percent and heart disease death risk by 23 percent. Read more from HealthDay.

The many years of warnings about Americans eating too much salt, and the recommendation by the American Heart Association and many others that we take no more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day, or a little more than half a teaspoon of salt, are being tossed over shoulders by a new expert committee commissioned by the Institute of Medicine at the behest of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why? Because that group has determined that there is not enough data about the health of people who eat less than 2,300 milligrams of salt a day to describe any benefit. In fact, as Gina Kolata reports in the New York Times, there may a downside to downsizing salt. Kolata cites a study published in 2011 that followed 28,800 subjects with high blood pressure ages 55 and older for 4.7 years and analyzed their sodium consumption by urinalysis. The researchers reported that the risks of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and death from heart disease increased significantly for those consuming more than 7,000 milligrams of sodium a day and for those consuming fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day. Read more in the New York Times.