Your health

Super food

Add capers to the list of nutrient-rich foods we should all eat more often. The tiny flower buds - from a Mediterranean shrub - may help prevent cancer.

Researcher from the University of Palermo in Italy added caper extracts to cooked meat and simulated how the food would be broken down in the stomach. The capers helped keep compounds that damage DNA from forming. Can't think of what to do with capers besides make chicken piccata? Add them to your favorite pasta and rice dishes.

Disease of presidents

Ten of the nation's 43 presidents suffered strokes either while in office or later in life, according to a Loyola University Medical Center neurologist who wrote a study on it.

Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind from history class, and you might remember former President Gerald Ford's 2000 stroke. Dwight D. Eisenhower had a non-disabling stroke while president, and John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur and Richard Nixon suffered strokes after leaving office.

Neurologist Dr. Jose Biller said the stricken presidents shared stroke risk factors, including gender, age and job stress.

Signs of stroke include slurred speech, facial droop, weakness or numbness on one side, loss of balance, full or partial vision loss and severe headache.

Shingles alert

Having a family history of shingles - the painful and potentially debilitating re-emergence of the chickenpox virus - increases your risk of coming down with it, according to a study in Archives of Dermatology. And the more relatives who've had shingles, the higher your risk.

Researchers looked at 1,027 people between 1992 and 2005 and found that of the more than 500 patients with shingles, 39 percent remembered a relative who'd had shingles, too. But just 11 percent of patients who had never had shingles knew of relatives who once had the disease.

There is a shingles vaccine, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people age 60 and older get it.