By Shereen Lehman (Reuters Health) – Children who skip lunch may not be getting enough vitamins and minerals from the rest of their meals and snacks, a study suggests. “Overall, the lunch meal is very important for helping children meet their nutrient needs, especially for fat-soluble vitamins A and D, minerals like calcium, phosphorus and magnesium that are important for healthy bones, and dietary fiber,” study coauthor Alison Eldridge of the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, told Reuters Health in an email. Eldridge and her colleagues wanted to fill that gap, so they examined information from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys 2009-2010 and 2011-2012.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The bathroom scale may show a good number but how much of that weight is fat, not muscle? New studies are adding to the evidence that the scale doesn’t always tell the whole story when it comes to weight-related health risks.

By Kathryn Doyle Reuters Health – For adolescents, low cardiorespiratory fitness and poor muscle strength increase their risk for type 2 diabetes later in life, regardless of body weight, according to a study of young men in Sweden. “Not only were both low aerobic and muscular fitness linked with a higher long-term risk of diabetes, but this was true even among those with normal body mass index,” said lead author Dr. Casey Crump of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

Volkswagen AG’s current chairman and chief executive were alerted by the carmaker’s former CEO to the use of illicit emissions-control software in the United States two weeks before the carmaker disclosed the scale of its manipulations, Bild am Sonntag reported, without citing the source of the information. Martin Winterkorn, who resigned within a week of Volkswagen’s (VW) biggest-ever corporate scandal becoming public on Sept. 18, briefed VW’s executive board on Sept. 8 that the carmaker had admitted the use of “defeat devices” to U.S. authorities, the newspaper said. Participants in the Sept. 8 meeting included then-finance chief Hans Dieter Poetsch and then-CEO of Porsche, Matthias Mueller, according to Bild am Sonntag.

Dangerous heavy metals used in oil production in war-torn South Sudan have leaked into drinking water sources used by 180,000 people with life-threatening health risks, a rights group said Friday. Toxicological tests carried out on hair samples from 96 volunteers living around the Thar Jath oil processing plant in South Sudan’s northern Unity region revealed they were “highly intoxicated with pollutants such as lead and barium,” said Klaus Stieglitz, from the German-based Sign of Hope organisation. “The total toxic stress — as found in the hair samples — of the human population of the area is life-threatening,” said Klaus-Dietrich Runow, from Germany’s Institute for Functional Medicine and Environmental Health, one of two separate independent toxicologists who assessed the samples.