Though it’s an emerging field, proponents of anti-inflammatory diets point to growing evidence that foods like vegetables and fish can ease an overactive immune system.

If you want to live longer — avoid heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer — then pick and choose your foods with care to quiet down parts of your immune system.

Exercise guru Denise Austin is always in motion, and she says you should be moving too. Here’s how.

Denise Austin has made a life out of motivating people to get moving. For more than 25 years, the San Pedro native has watched the fitness world transform, cheerleading along the way. She’s sold more than 20 million exercise videos and DVDs, starred in fitness television shows since the 1980s and written 10 books. She’s married and lives in Washington, D.C., has two teenage daughters, runs an online diet and fitness program on her website and is preparing to make even more DVDs and TV shows and write more books.

Dodging the dentist over cost can be pound-foolish. There are ways to save.

Times are tough enough for Californians; they’re even tougher for Californians’ teeth.

Current recommendations are for kids to start seeing a dentist as soon as the first tooth erupts, which can be as young as 6 months.

Inflammation is clearly the culprit in rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis (in which chemicals produced by immune cells cause joints to swell) and some other chronic pain conditions such as sciatica and temporomandibular joint disorder.

Mediterranean-style diets — ones rich in fruits, vegetables, olive and canola oils, nuts, red wine and fish and low in red meat and saturated fats — have been linked in population studies to many potential health benefits. Here are some examples.

The drug, called denosumab, blocks production of cells that break down bones. In two studies, spinal fractures were reduced by two-thirds in women ages 60-90 and in men getting prostate cancer therapy

The first member of a new class of osteoporosis drugs reduced spinal fractures by about two-thirds in post-menopausal women and in men undergoing hormone-deprivation therapy for prostate cancer, according to two studies released online today by the New England Journal of Medicine .

You can lower your risk of several chronic diseases by 80 percent if you exercise, eat well, don’t smoke and avoid obesity, a study finds.

If people would just do four things — engage in regular physical activity, eat a healthy diet, not smoke and avoid becoming obese — they could slash their risk of diabetes, heart attack, stroke or cancer by 80%, a new report has found.

Modern food production gives salmonella, E. coli and Listeria an advantage in causing food-borne illnesses. But Congress and the FDA are fighting back.

Ground beef, romaine lettuce, cilantro, Anaheim peppers, granola nut clusters, alfalfa sprouts and a seeming host of products featuring nonfat dry milk, including yogurt, chai tea, shake mixes, frosting packets, drink powders and cocoa, gravy and sauce mixes — all have been recalled in the last two months because of possible salmonella contamination.

The deadly bacterium, responsible for recent pistachio and peanut recalls, can live in many wild animals and in almost any climate. And it’s thriving in our modern lifestyle.

This is salmonella’s world. We’re just living in it.