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David Nieman, DrPH (photo above), and colleagues have shown that you DO burn a lot of calories after exercising, at least if you exercise at an intensity roughly equal to 70 percent of your vo2 max. That's a little slower than your marathon pace, but a little faster than your everyday EZ run pace.

In Nieman's study, a group of 10 healthy young-adult males (including three clinically obese subjects) burned 519 calories while exercising for 45 minutes on an exercise bike. Then, over the next 14 hours, they burned an additional 190 calories (above their normal calorie burn) while just sitting around.That's a 37 percent boost beyond the calories burned on the bikes. Another way of looking at it: If you burn 500 calories by running about 5 miles, you can gain almost another 2 miles of running through your after-burn calories. Thus, 5 miles becomes 7 miles, at least in terms of calorie-burning. That's great news for runners and other vigorous exercisers.

A new study published on Thursday in the journal Health Affairs calculates that it would cost the average American an extra $380 in fruits and vegetables per year to meet the government's recommendation for potassium intake alone. Healthy foods are expensive. Conversely, the unhealthier your diet gets, the less it costs. The study found that for each 1% increase in calories from saturated fat, food costs decline by 28¢; for each 1% increase in calories from added sugar, the savings equal 7¢.

Not only are fresh, whole foods costly, but there isn't enough of them to go around. Regarding the U.S. food supply, the researchers wrote: The current system has proved to be remarkably effective in the provision of calories, but not as good at supplying nutrients. More fundamentally, the system currently falls short of producing enough vegetables and fruit to supply Americans with even the minimum recommended number of daily servings of these foods.

Potassium was, calorie for calorie, the most expensive nutrient. U.S. guidelines recommend that Americans get 4,700 mg of potassium each day, but study participants got just 2,800 mg per day on average. In order to make up the difference, a person would have to spend an additional $1.04 per day

A big new article in the Journal Of The American Heart Association seems to have a little good news for everyone, and maybe the most for women who are heavy exercisers. Distance running reduces heart-attack risks. The article, a meta-analysis of past studies, is the first paper to quantify the dose-response relationship between leisure time physical activity (i.e., exercise as opposed to walking around on the job) and heart disease.

men and women who perform 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week have, on average, a 14 percent lower risk of heart disease than similar groups who perform virtually no exercise. If you exercise 300 minutes a week, your risk reduction increases to 20 percent. At 750 minutes, the risk reduction is about 25 percent.

Exercise helped women prevent heart disease more than it did men, particularly at high exercise levels. The researchers admitted they could not explain this differential. They also, thank goodness, converted their findings from minutes of exercise per week to calories burned during exercise per week. Since many runners burn about 100 calories per mile covered, it's easy to turn your weekly mileage into weekly calories burned. For example, if you run about 20 miles a week, that's about 2000 calories burned.

A new study adds yet another reason to consider scaling back your soda intake, and it's already putting beverage makers on the defensive. Researchers from the School of Public Health at Imperial College in London analyzed the diets of nearly 2,700 middle-aged people in the U.S. and the U.K. They found that people drinking more than one soda or other sugar-sweetened beverage a day had higher blood pressure, and that it kept going up the more they drank. After accounting for weight and other risk factors, that habit seemed to still put them at greater risk for cardiovascular problems.

The researchers also found that people who drank more than one sugary drink a day consumed nearly 400 more calories than those who didn't. And their diets were more likely to lack key nutrients like potassium, magnesium and calcium. "This is because they're getting the calories from these nutrient-poor sources. All they provide is the calories — none of the benefits of real foods," Brown says.

The new study seems to bolster previous research showing that cutting back even just a serving of soda a day can help lower blood pressure for those most at risk.