Be careful who you eat with. New research conducted at the Behavioural Science Institute of the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands suggests that people who eat together eat alike, meaning they eat as quickly or as slowly as their partner. The researchers, who published their work in PLoS ONE, carefully observed 70 pairs of young women who had not previously met as they ate a meal together, watching when and how often each of the women took a bite of food. HealthDay reports that if one diner took a bite within five seconds of her partner, the researchers noted the behavior as “mimicry.” What did they find? The women did indeed mimic each other, and the mimicry went both ways. They also found that the mimicry was more pronounced during the first 20 minutes of dining together. Read more in HealthDay.

Yes, it feels good, and yes, it can be pricey, but massage also does some important muscle reclamation work after a particularly tough workout. Researchers at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario conducted genetic analysis of muscle biopsies taken from the quadriceps of eleven young men after they had exercised to exhaustion on a stationary bicycle. A McMaster news release reports on the research, for which one of their legs was randomly chosen to be massaged, and researchers took biopsies from both legs prior to the exercise, immediately after 10 minutes of massage treatment and after a 2.5 hour period of recovery. The tests showed that massage dampened the expression of inflammatory cytokines in the muscle cells and promoted biogenesis energy producing mitochondria. The researchers suspect the pain relief from massage may work in ways similar to conventional anti-inflammatory drugs, but of course, without the drugs. Read more from McMaster University.  More on massage and lower back pain.

The findings are preliminary, but they are also provocative: research conducted at the University of California at San Francisco suggests that men who do vigorous exercise three times a week have an increase in the expression of certain genes that are known to suppress tumors, including some breast cancer tumors that similar to prostate cancer tumors. HealthDay reports that when researchers compared prostate genes from 70 men with low-risk prostate cancer to normal prostate genes from 70 men they found 184 genes that were differently expressed in men who did activities such as jogging, tennis or swimming for at least three hours a week, compared with genes in men who did less exercise. The exercisers also had increased expression of genes involved in DNA repair. HealthDay reports that earlier research by the same team revealed links between vigorous activity and a lowered risk of prostate cancer progression and death. One of those studies found that men with prostate cancer who did three or more hours a week of vigorous activity had a 60 percent lower risk of death from prostate cancer, compared to men who participated in less than one hour per week of vigorous physical activity. Another showed that men who walked three miles per hour or faster had about half the risk of prostate cancer progression of men who walked at two miles per hour or less. Read more from HealthDay.