The latest advances

Light drinkers of wine don't load lard onto bellies.

Alcohol: Watch patterns, not just amounts Keeping an eye on your drinks this holiday season? What, when and how you drink can be as important to health as the amount you drink, a new study says.

Here's how: Alcohol intake affects how much fat you accumulate in your abdomen, and too much "central adiposity" (that's doc-talk for abdominal fat) raises your risk of heart disease.

The biggest bellies are built by hard liquor, find researchers at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Wine causes the least increase. Male beer drinkers had bigger bellies to start with, but binge drinkers (anyone who has more than three or four drinks in a single session, but not regularly) have the most ab fat; people who regularly drink small amounts of alcohol have the least ab fat, even less than abstainers. Sorry -- that doesn't mean you should take up drinking to help shrink your big belly.

Nausea: Bands do help Acupressure wrist bands, available without a prescription at drugstores, can relieve nausea from seasickness, motion sickness and pregnancy. Now a new study of 700 patients at the University of Rochester in New York finds the bands help nausea in chemotherapy, especially if the patient expects them to do so. On the day of chemo and for the next four days, patients who wore acupressure bands reported 15% less nausea than others. In patients expecting them to help, there was 25% less nausea on treatment day.

-- Peggy J. Noonan