New report ranks the health of 3,000 US counties – HuffPost Healthy Living The top 7 excuses for not working out and how to squash them – Prevention Rain or allergies? The best outdoor workouts for these (and more) complaints – Shape How to not let back pain ruin your fitness regimen – Fit Bottomed Girls Everything you need to know about the new low-carb “milk” drinks – Daily Spark Build muscle and burn fat with this at-home workout – Peanut Butter Fingers Get your protein levels up with these sweet and spicy chickpeas – Mind Body Green

OnSugar blogger Coach Lark Says encourages his pregnant clients to exercise while pregnant – safely, of course. He shares a few tips on how to exercise when pregnant below. Here are some of the best reasons to exercise when you are pregnant, which I have gathered from a variety of sources. Better psychological wellbeing Reduced incidence of gestational diabetes Decreased incidence of preclampsia Reduced lower back pain Improved weight management Improved fetal development Easier or shorter labor Decreased risk of premature labor Greatly reduced incidence of abdominal surgery during delivery Of course, it’s important to modify your workout to accommodate and support the pregnancy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t work out as hard. Maintaining the workout intensity you had going into your pregnancy is exactly what you want to do. It’s not time to start a new program. It is time to work the core in three planes of motion to strengthen the abdominals for pushing during labor. When I work with expecting moms at my training facility at the Bentley Reserve in downtown San Francisco, I advise them according to the following parameters. Read his tips after the break.

Is it true melatonin can help you sleep better? That’s the question the WSJ’s Christina Tsuei posed to Lawrence Epstein , a sleep expert from Harvard Medical School. His answers are in the video below. Watch to find out what melatonin is, for whom a melatonin supplement is likely to work best, how you can use one to ease your next transatlantic trip and how to identify your sleep needs. This is the first in our “Is It True?” video series here at the Health Blog. We’re aiming to answer everyday health questions. Have a suggestion for a future video topic? Please email us at healthblog@wsj.com.

If you ever needed someone to make the case for why it’s important to smile, think of today’s talk by Ron Gutman at TED University . (That’s a short series of presentations by TED conference participants.) Gutman, a member of the TED conference team and CEO of health-information company HealthTap , pointed out a study from the University of California, Berkeley that measured smiles in high school yearbook photos and looked at what the students were up to decades later. The bigger smilers were more likely to be in a long-lasting marriage and to have a better sense of personal well-being. Another study found that the size of major league baseball players’ smiles in their trading-card photos predicted longevity. Players who didn’t smile at all lived an average of 72.9 years, those with some semblance of a smile lived  75 years and those with a “beaming smile” lived to be nearly 80. Some other fun factoids: smiling is contagious, and children do it as often as 400 times a day, says Gutman. In brain studies, a smile stimulates the brain as much as 2,000 bars of chocolate and lowers stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and while boosting positive ones, he says. Photo: Getty Images

Stress is no good for the immune system and can make you vulnerable to upper respiratory viruses, aka the common cold. One common source of stress is work, and a new study found that men were more likely to catch colds while dealing with workplace stress than their female coworkers. The study followed 1,241 workers after assessing their stress levels based on demands of the job, job control, and social support. The men who reported stress at the beginning of the study were much more likely to report colds than women. There was no “significant association” between women’s stress levels and their developing colds. A couple of months ago we learned that women tend to be more resilient then men after traumatic injury, which scientists believe is a product of evolution. Not sure if that is the answer here, but is this your experience? Do you see a correlation between work stress and colds in the men in your life?

The end of the year is a good time to reevaluate and renegotiate your gym membership to ensure you are getting what you need at the best rate. If you workout at the gym regularly, it’s crucial you are comfortable, and it is meeting your needs, otherwise you’ll have just another excuse not to show up and sweat it out. How does your gym stack up? What's Your Gym's Biggest Shortcoming? Machine quality and or quantity Class variety or schedule Overall cleanliness (or lack there of!) Crowds Staff Something else. I’ll tell you in comments.

A panel sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has guidelines for food allergies, but questions remain.

According to a new study reported in the LA Times, something as simple as patience could help lower the rate of Cesarean section deliveries, which, today account for a third of all births in the United States. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development released a study which showed that the rates of C sections were twice as high in cases where labor had been induced when compared with cases of spontaneous labor. The purport of this is not that induction of labor was responsible for increased C section rates but that perhaps both point to a lack of patience among the mothers as well as doctors. Nearly half of the surgical deliveries that occurred after labor started were seen as being due to “failure to progress”. Doctors seem not to take into account the fact that labor can often be very unpredictable; particularly among first time mothers and they need to take the time to properly assess the situation before rushing to perform a C section. According to Dr. S. Katherine Laughon, a co-author of the study “as long as the maternal and fetal health are doing well in labor, they can wait longer and perhaps decrease the cesarean rate.” Digg this! Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on del.icio.us Tweet This! Share this on Facebook Share this on Blinklist Buzz up! Post on Google Buzz

FitSugar reader KittyTX loves to run outside in the heat and asked this question to the community. I was born and raised in Texas, so I think that has a lot to do with my comfort in hot weather that everyone else thinks is miserable. I live in Austin now, and it’s been over a hundred degrees for a  long time now. I absolutely love the heat and hate cold weather. I actually wake up shivering in the mornings, because the house temperature has sunk to 72 degrees while I was sleeping. I HATE the environment at work, because all the (slightly overweight) women turn the AC down to the 60s. My question is:  What is the danger of working out in the 105 degree (literally) weather we have going on here? People look at me like I’m nuts and act like it’s one of the worst things that I can do to my body when I head out the door at 2 into the blazing sun. The truth is, this is my favorite time of year, because it’s the only time I’m comfortable. I love being outdoors to get exercise, because I have no motivation to go to the gym since I doze off from the boredom of running towards a wall for 30 minutes. I also refuse to wait until it’s almost dark to go outside like most people like to do around here, because I’m a woman (whose been attacked before) and I know it’s not safe. I wear tons of sunscreen. I drink plenty of water. I maintain my asthma really well, and it only really bothers me in the winter. Is it really that bad for my body? Leave your two cents in the comments section below. If you have a health or fitness-related question of your own, then ask it here .

Also: traveling within the U.S. for cheaper, better medical care; gene therapy makes a comeback; glucosamine doesn’t seem to help lower back pain.