10 Food Swaps For a Healthier Cinco de Mayo

Use them instead of: Pickled jalapenos Why they're healthier: Mass-produced pickled vegetables are soaked in preservatives (such as sodium benzoate) and often contain added sugars and sodium. Raw jalapenos, on the other hand, are sodium-free and have just 4 calories per pepper—not to mention a fresher, spicier flavor. Plus, research has shown that raw peppers have a higher concentration of antioxidants, including capsaicin, a compound that gives peppers their heat and makes your body temperature rise, helping you burn fat and calories faster.

10 Food Swaps For a Healthier Cinco de Mayo

Mexican dishes are a crowd favorite, but they're often loaded with cheese and fatty ingredients. So we gathered recipes that use fresh vegetables, lean protein, and fiber-rich beans to get the same great taste with less saturated fat and calories. In general, you should aim for 30% or less of calories come from fat, and most of those calories should come from healthy unsaturated fat. All fruits and vegetables, due to their rich nutrient and fiber content, help to combat chronic inflammation, so make sure to include adequate amounts of these foods daily. Some types of fresh produce, however, are even more potent than others. Some terrific anti-inflammatory fruits and vegetables to include in your meal plan include apples, berries, broccoli, mushrooms, papaya, pineapple, and spinach. So try one of these Mexican food recipes tonight!

8 Recipes for a Healthy Taco Night

Before you roll up your sleeves and dive into these tasty taco-night recipes, you have an important decision to make: hard taco shells, or soft? For soft tacos, wrap 24 corn tortillas in a clean kitchen towel and microwave for one minute and 30 seconds. To make hard shells, preheat oven to 450 degrees. Loosely fold tortillas in half and overlap on a baking sheet. Bake until just crisp, 8 to 12 minutes.Ingredients: Ground turkey, tomatoes, onion, chipotle chiles, ground cumin, fresh oregano, olive oil, salt, pepper Calories: 185

Dancing With the Stars: The Workout

Most of us weren't born with the flexibility of an Olympic gymnast—and that includes ABC's Dancing With the Stars pro Cheryl Burke. "I am not one of those girls who can just land in a split," says Cheryl, 28. "I need to warm up to be flexible." Before you launch into a dance workout, Burke recommends doing this eight-minute warm-up routine, which stretches and strengthens the muscles surrounding the hips, thighs, and ankles. Three days a week, begin with two minutes of jumping jacks and dive into these moves. DWTS-style heels—strictly optional!Benefit: Strengthens and stretches thighs, hips and glutes How to do it: Stand with feet a bit wider than hip-width, toes turned out. With hands on hips and back straight, lower butt toward ground until you feel a stretch in thighs. Pulse, moving ever so slightly up and down, for 10 counts. Rest for 30 to 60 seconds; repeat.Benefit: Stretches and strengthens feet and ankles How to do it: Extend right leg, point toes and "write" the entire alphabet in lowercase letters, using right leg as the "pen." Rest for 30 seconds. Repeat alphabet using uppercase letters and a larger range of motion. Repeat with left leg.

Live Healthy, Live Longer

Making just a few changes in your lifestyle can help you live longer. A recent study found that four bad behaviors—smoking, drinking too much alcohol, not exercising, and not eating enough fruits and veggies—can hustle you into an early grave, and, in effect, age you by as many as 12 years. Fortunately, you can do something to correct these and other unhealthy behaviors. Adopt the following nine habits to keep your body looking and feeling young.If you want to live to 100, leaving a little bit of food on your plate may be a good idea. Author Dan Buettner, who studies longevity around the world, found that the oldest Japanese people stop eating when they are feeling only about 80% full. St. Louis University researchers have confirmed that eating less helps you age slower; in a 2008 study they found that limiting calories lowered production of T3, a thyroid hormone that slows metabolism—and speeds up the aging process.Too much time in front of the boob tube can take a serious toll on your health. In fact, a 2010 study found that people who watched four or more hours a day were 46% more likely to die from any cause than people who watched less than two hours a day. Even cutting back a little can help; each additional hour you watch increases your overall risk of dying by 11% and dying from heart disease by 18%.

9 Reasons Not to Ignore GERD Symptoms

For most Americans, heartburn is just an occasional problem. Sixty million people get it at least once a month.But for the 19 million people who have a chronic form of heartburn known as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), untreated symptoms can lead to a variety of health complications.If you experience frequent or extended heartburn (twice a week on a regular basis), see your doctor. Here are nine reasons why you shouldn’t ignore signs of GERD.

Number of Women Without Children Reaches All Time High

The number of American women without children has risen to an all-time high of 1 in 5, a jump since the 1970s when 1 in 10 women ended their childbearing years without having a baby, according to the Pew Research Center.

About 1.9 million women aged 40-44 -- or 18 percent -- were childless in 2008, an 80 percent increase since 1976, when just 580,000 -- 10 percent of those in that age bracket -- had never given birth, the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey shows.

Childlessness has increased across racial and ethnic groups and most education levels, but has dropped among women with advanced degrees in the past decade, according to the research.

Part of the reason for the rise in the number of childless women is an overall pattern toward delaying marriage and having kids, the research showed. Experts say that a drop in societal pressure to be a parent is also responsible for the trend, along with an increase in career opportunities and an improvement in birth control options and effectiveness.

"People put off getting pregnant," said women's health expert Dr. Laura Corio, a member of AOL Health's Medical Advisory Board. "Even when they're married they're putting off getting pregnant. Then they wake up one day and they're 40 and they want to have a child. It's like, hello?"

Explanations for the trend vary, but for some, the reason behind delaying parenting is a simple joie de vivre.

"They're freer. People are enjoying their lives: they're traveling, shopping, eating out," Corio told AOL Health. "Putting a baby into the situation is going to change everything."

Though the most educated women are still among those most likely to never give birth, there was a 31 percent decline in those aged 40-44 with master's, doctoral or professional degrees who had not had babies between 1994 and 2008, when 24 percent of women in that category were childless.

The data represents combined statistics from 2006 and 2008 (referred to as 2008 in the study) and from 1992 and 1994 (referred to as 1994).

White women remain the most likely not to have had a child, but the childless rates have grown more quickly for blacks, Hispanics and Asians over the past decade, according to the figures.

Never-married women still had the highest incidence of childlessness, though those rates also have declined over the past 10 years. By comparison, the childless rates have increased for those who are married or were at one time -- referred to as the "ever-marrieds."

"A lot of women can't find someone, or they're very picky or very educated," Corio said. "Contraception is also better. A lot of pregnancies in the past may have been accidents where they decided to keep the baby. It's also money -- they think, we're not in the financial situation [to have children]."

Among the women aged 40 to 44 without children, the number of those who didn't want to have children equaled the number of those who did but weren't able to conceive, according to figures from the National Survey of Family Growth.

In 2003, about 6 percent of women in that age group were voluntarily childless, 6 percent were involuntarily childless and 2 percent didn't have children but wanted them in the future.

Along with the population changes have come shifts in attitude, with public opinion showing more acceptance of women without children, Pew Research reported. Most adults -- 59 percent in 2002 -- said they disagree with the statement that people who don't have kids "lead empty lives," compared to only 39 percent who didn't agree with the statement in 1988.

Similarly, a 2007 Pew survey showed that 41 percent of adults believe children are important for a successful marriage, down from 65 percent who expressed the same views in 1990.

About 46 percent of people said the trend has no bearing on society, according to a 2009 Pew survey, but 38 percent said it was bad for society -- up from 29 percent in 2007.