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‘Fidgeting could prolong your life’, alternative uses for love-handle fat and how the loss of a child affects a mother

'Fidgeting could prolong your life' is the headline in this morning´s Daily Telegraph - which is just as well, as it shouldn´t take long to run through today´s papers.

The Guardian and the Independent dwell on the fall-out from yesterday´s BMA annual conference  which called for the resignation of health secretary Andrew Lansley and backed further industrial action over pensions.

Both stories were broken yesterday on PulseToday, so pausing to glance at "Fat from my love handles was used to make me bigger downstairs" in The Sun, we turn to the Daily Mail, where we learn that "Mother's risk of an early death soars by 133% following loss of a child".

The Mail reveals research by a US team from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana and the Rochester Institute of Technology who studied 69,224 mothers aged 20 to 50 for nine years, tracking the mortality of children even after they had left home.

The study revealed mothers were at a far higher risk of dying for two years after the loss of their child. This was true regardless of the age of their child at the time of death, the paper says.

No mechanism is proposed for this link, however, so it´straight back to fidgeting, without further ado.  The Telegraph reveals that spending too much time on sedentary activities like watching television or working at a computer can shorten your lifespan and raise your risk of conditions like heart disease and stroke.

Quoting Dr Wilby Williamson, an NHS expert in sports and exercise medicine, speaking at the launch of something called the Fidget project, the paper suggests that breaking up your "sitting time" throughout the day with simple activities like walking or stretching your legs – even for a minute or two at a time – could counteract the harmful effects of being a couch potato and lead to better overall health. Sounds like good advice to me, so I´ll be off, then.