6 Habits You Didn't Know Were Keeping You Alive

We could all probably start making an effort to live more healthily, but most of us either can't find the time or are too busy eating Oreos to walk to the treadmill. Well, in a twist of fate so beautiful you want to make passionate love to it on the couch with the blinds open, science is now claiming that the most seemingly innocent things you do (or did) on a daily basis can be just as good for you as a lifetime of exercise and carrot juice.

Scientists have long suspected that bad oral hygiene and heart problems were somehow connected, though they could never explain it beyond the widely popular "fangletoothed weirdos are the enemies of God" hypothesis. Dental specialists at Bristol University now believe that Streptococcus, a common bacterium responsible for tooth decay, might be the one to blame as they discovered that it also causes blood clots when it enters the human bloodstream.

Just look at this douche.

Streptococcus is most often restricted to the oral cavity, but all it takes is one bowl of Cap'n Crunch to shred up your mouth and let the bastard loose in the rest of your body. Once inside, it promptly encases itself in a cocoon that protects it from antibiotics and your immune system.

Sort of like the Batmobile.

With time, the armored bacteria start to lump together on the arteries and form clots, effectively cutting off the blood supply to your heart and killing you to death.

In case of cardiac arrest, try to squirt some in your left ventricle.

You really shouldn't need any extra reasons to brush your teeth, but even so, the Bristol discovery will probably still have a big impact on the entire world, from new treatments of cardiovascular diseases right down to exorbitant toothpaste prices as Procter & Gamble inevitably tries to market Crest as heart medication.

Over the last decade, cell phones have been subjected to more negative press than BP. No one today could imagine life without these devices, yet we keep hearing about the many forms of cancer they supposedly give you and the countless children they orphan each year because their parents were trying to call someone an asshat via text message while doing 70 on the interstate. In an effort to ratchet up the anti-cell phone hate speech, researchers at the University of South Florida decided to try to prove that prolonged use of mobile phones can actually give you Alzheimer's.

"Wait ... I forgot what we were doing."

They tested their theory by blasting a couple of laboratory mice with a hellstorm of electromagnetic waves -- the equivalent of talking two hours a day on a cell for seven to nine months. Contrary to everything we know about science, none of the mice transformed into superheroes.

Results not typical.

What did happen was that the mice seemingly developed an immunity to Alzheimer's.

The way it apparently works is that the electromagnetic waves from a cell phone penetrate the brain and proceed to erase buildup of a certain protein responsible for lesions and dementia. What this means is that extended use of a cell phone could not only vaccinate you against Alzheimer's, but also possibly help kill the disease even after its onset.

Annoying people will outlive us all.

So, in an effort to vilify cell phones even more, the scientists in Florida stumbled across arguably one of the most promising finds in the history of Alzheimer's research. And if you think about it, texting while driving also prevents Alzheimer's, because you almost certainly won't live long enough to develop the disease.

Unlike cell phones, day care already has a pretty decent rap. It stimulates social growth, provides a healthy learning environment for children and gives parents a place to stash their kids while they're cleaning rat traps at Shoney's for $6 an hour. On top of all that, recent studies are showing that sending your kids to day care might actually help protect them from leukemia.

But hot glue guns can still cause trouble.

In 2008, cancer research specialists from Berkeley analyzed 14 separate studies on leukemia encompassing over 20,000 children worldwide and came to a surprising conclusion: Children who started day care at age 1 or 2 had a whopping 30 percent less chance of coming down with childhood leukemia compared with the ones who didn't. The reason? Kids are dirty little bastards.

Childhood cancer is most often triggered by an infection early in life. By exposing your kids to a day care filled with horrible frolicking stinkchildren, you also expose them to a torrent of infections, thereby stimulating and prepping their immune systems.

"Ready everyone? OK, swap bandaids!"

Although childhood leukemia is incredibly rare (it affects only 20 to 30 kids out of a million) we can all agree that parents should take all possible steps to protect their children from it. Especially if the solution proposed by science is dumping them off at an institution to be raised by someone else.