French fries, America’s favorite vegetable, isn’t really French at all. According to Wikipedia, Thomas Jefferson is attributed to coining the phrase. Jefferson had his French chef, Honore Julien, deep fry the small pieces of raw potatoes. Belgium is actually the country best known for these delicacies with recipes dating back to 1680.

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You bend and turn, twist and burn, all in an effort to lose that gut, but your pooch persists. But what can you do? Look at the food you’re feeding your body and replace some of the belly busters with slimming stomach staples (as in crucial diet ingredients, not invasive surgery fasteners).

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According to experts, the walkstations, which resemble treadmills with computers attached, represent a bold new step by the medical community in an effort to fight the rising obesity epidemic.

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Let it slip that you’re trying to slim down and suddenly everyone you meet is a weight loss expert. Don’t eat white food, they’ll say. Drink gallons of water. Don’t eat after 5 P.M. It may be impossible to avoid unsolicited diet advice, but with SELF’s help, now you’ll know what’s worth listening to.

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Acid Reflux, another term for heartburn, is a disease which is created by a simple imbalance of chemical make-up in the body–the attack of acid reflux in the esophagus when it is supposed to be in the stomach only.

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Nutritionist Susan Burke weighs in on five simple changes you can make. Doing these can lead to weight loss without really trying.

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Thin is still in, at least for the moment. But I believe there’s a difference between what looks good and what feels good to men. And what looks good to them may not look good to us. Many people are turned off by extremes — extremely heavy, extremely thin, extremely tall and extremely short.

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Eating a rich diet filled with leafy green vegetables may cut heart damage in the event of heart attack, a study suggests.

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While there is some controversy about whether we all need eight glasses of fluid a day, the popularity of bottled water shows no let up. It’s healthful, it’s refreshing, and bottles are easy to carry. Despite the benefits of this trend, an increasing number of cities have enacted a ban on bottled waters, not because of the water, but to avoid the tremendous costs of eliminating the bottles.

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Take avocados and peanuts, for example. Not too long ago they wore a big scarlet “F” for too much fat. Yet as peanuts and avocados sat languishing on many people’s bad-for-you lists, researchers discovered that the fat in these two foods, mostly the monounsaturated kind, is extremely good for the heart–and for health in general.

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