“This replicates and reinforces what we already know about sugar-sweetened beverages,” he said, “but the findings highlight their severe costs on health and productivity, especially in Africa and Latin America.”

The study detailed intriguing patterns in the consumption of sugary drinks. For example, researchers found that men had modestly higher rates of soda consumption than women. Intake was higher among the well-educated, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. In the Middle East and North Africa by contrast, the study found that soda consumption was higher among adults with comparatively lower levels of education.South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia had the lowest rates of excess cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes linked to sugary drink consumption, the study found, though the authors noted that the data did not include sugar-sweetened tea and coffee, items that are popular in those parts of the world.

Laura Lara-Castor, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Washington and another lead author of the Nature study, said the higher rates of consumption among educated adults in sub-Saharan Africa reflected in part the aspirational lure of soft drink brands associated with Western tastes and style — a result of the sophisticated and well-funded advertising campaigns by multinational beverage companies.

“Consuming these drinks is often a mark of status,” she said.

Despite the study’s grim findings, Dr. Lara-Castor and the other authors said the data also contained reasons for hope. Soda consumption in Latin America and the Caribbean is already beginning to decline, thanks in part to policies like soda taxes, marketing restrictions and package labels that seek to educate consumers about the dangers of products high in added sugar. (In the United States, consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has dropped since its peak in 2000 but those declines have largely plateaued in recent years.)

More than 80 countries have adopted measures aimed at decreasing sugary drink consumption.

Paula Johns, executive director of ACT Health Promotion, an advocacy group in Brazil, said the Nature study showed that education alone was not enough to dampen consumer zeal for sweetened drinks. In recent years, she said that Brazil had adopted a number of policies that are beginning to dent the nation’s love affair with highly processed food and sugary drinks. They include better school-meal programs, bold front-of-package warnings and a new excise tax on beverages with added sugar.

“There’s no magic bullet,” she said. “But all these policies, taken together, help send the message to the public that sugar-sweetened beverages are really bad for your health.”

Good shut-eye is critical for all sorts of reasons — but now there’s a compelling new one, according to a study.

An international team of scientists discovered an interesting incentive for getting eight hours of sleep a night.

Make sure to get plenty of slumber if you’re trying to learn a new language, researchers say. 

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The study, led by the University of South Australia, revealed that the coordination of two electrical events in the sleeping brain “significantly” improves its ability to remember new words and complex grammatical rules, as news agency SWNS reported.

To explore the relationship between memory retention and sleep, researchers at the university asked 35 English-speaking adults to study Mini Pinyin, a miniature language based on Mandarin. 

Mini Pinyin’s grammatical rules are similar to English. 

The language contains 32 verbs and 25 nouns, SWNS reported, including 10 human entities, 10 animals and five objects. 

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Overall, the language has 576 unique sentences.

The participants were split into two groups. 

Half the participants learned the language in the morning — the other half learned it in the evening, then slept on it. 

Half of them learned the language in the morning and returned in the evening to have their memory tested. 

The other half learned Mini Pinyin in the evening, slept through the night and had their memory tested the next morning. 

Sleep does not just mean a period of rest. “It is also an active, transformative state of the brain,” said a researcher involved in the new study.  (iStock)

Researchers also tracked the brain activity of the second group during their sleep, said SWNS. 

Those who slept performed significantly better than those who remained awake, according to the findings, which were published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

FDA APPROVES FIRST MEDICATION FOR OBSTRUCTIVE SLEEP APNEA, WHICH ALSO PROMOTES WEIGHT LOSS

Lead researcher Zachariah Cross, PhD, said sleep-based improvements were linked to the coupling of slow oscillations and sleep spindles — brainwave patterns that synchronize during NREM sleep.  

Cross, who earned his PhD at the University of South Australia and is now based at Northwestern University in the U.S., said that “the coupling likely reflects the transfer of learned information from the hippocampus to the cortex, enhancing long-term memory storage.”

Those who slept performed significantly better than those who remained awake, according to the findings.  (iStock)

Post-sleep neural activity, he also said, “showed unique patterns … suggesting a strong link between sleep-induced brainwave coordination and learning patterns.”

The study underscores the importance of sleep in learning complex linguistic rules, said researcher Scott Cousens of the University of South Australia.

DO WOMEN NEED MORE SLEEP THAN MEN? HERE’S WHAT EXPERTS THINK

Sleep does not just mean a time to rest, he suggested. 

“It is also an active, transformative state of the brain,” he said. 

The research team said it plans to explore how sleep and wake dynamics influence the learning of other complex cognitive tasks.

The research team said it plans to explore how sleep and wake dynamics influence the learning of other complex cognitive tasks, aside from language studies. (iStock)

“Understanding how the brain works has implications beyond language learning,” said Cross. “It could revolutionize how we approach education, rehabilitation and cognitive training.”

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Dr. Brian Licuanan, a board-certified clinical psychologist in California, recently told Fox News Digital that there are a variety of reasons sleep can be disrupted — including medical and mental health conditions, diet, alcohol intake and other lifestyle behaviors, such as screen exposure.

Among the tips for better sleep — as shared by Licuanan, the author of “How to Get Your Resisting Loved One Into Treatment” — are being more cognizant of food and drink consumption. 

For more Health articles, visit www.foxnews.com/health

“Carve out time for exercise and healthy eating habits, as that will help you relax and promote better sleep.”

Angelica Stabile of Fox News Digital contributed reporting.

Snakes like these are giants. Black mambas can stretch to 14 feet, and the longest king cobra ever recorded was 19 feet.

Puff adders are petite by contrast, as short as six inches and no longer than six feet, but very thick. They have long, retractable fangs that can deliver poison into muscle.

Their venom destroys blood-clotting factors, and victims die slow, gruesome deaths, bleeding in the brain, eyes and mouth.

Identifying the attacker can help tailor treatment. But many people never see the snake that bites them or, if they do, cannot identify it. To the untrained eye, venomous snakes may look indistinguishable from harmless ones.

The names don’t make it any easier. Green mambas are green, but black mambas are pale gray to dark brown; they are so-named because the inside of the mouth is black. They are better recognized by their coffin-shaped head and unnerving smile.

Some scientists are building A.I. models to identify snakes, so that anyone with a smartphone might be able to distinguish them.

About a third of snakebites are in children. They occur less often among pregnant women, but the outcomes — which include spontaneous abortion, ruptured placentas, abruption, fetal malformations and death to both mother and fetus — can be catastrophic.

Often the victims are farmers. The loss of a breadwinner devastates families.

Ruth Munuve’s husband worked as a driver in Nairobi and came home to the family farm every other weekend. He was bitten on a Saturday in April 2020, at age 42, while walking through the brush on his way home from a night out.

Two hospitals scrambling to treat Covid patients turned him away. By the time he died two days later, his body had swelled to double its size, a hallmark of a puff adder bite, said his sister, Esther Nziu.

Ms. Munuve now grows maize and cowpeas, mostly for food, and sells green grams. Ms. Nziu has five children of her own, but she is doing her best to help raise her brother’s four children.

Money is tight, but the women still paid to fortify the house. “I don’t want anybody else to be bitten by snakes,” Ms. Nziu said.