LONDON (Reuters) - Keeping slim is one of the best ways of preventing cancer, as is avoiding excessive amounts of red meat and wine, a landmark study has revealed.

It found convincing evidence of a link to six types of cancer, five more than in its last report, 10 years ago.

Among the new types sortstop are colorectal (bowel) and post-menopausal breast cancer.

Professor Michael Marmot, chair of the panel of 21 eminent scientists who compiled the report, said: "We are recommending that people aim to be as lean as possible within the healthy range, and that they avoid weight gain throughout adulthood."

The report, which selected 7,000 studies from a worldwide pool of 500,000 written since records began in the 1960s, includes five key findings.

They are that processed meats, such as ham and bacon, increase the risk of colorectal cancer, and should be eaten sparingly.

Another is the link between red meat and colorectal cancer, for which the evidence is stronger than ever. People should not eat more than 500g of cooked red meat a week -- or between 700g and 750g for "blue" or uncooked meat.

A further finding was the strongest evidence yet that alcohol is a cause of cancer. If people must drink, the report said, they should limit their intake to two units a day for a man or one for a woman. A unit is a half pint of beer or a small glass of wine.

The report recommended mothers breastfeed exclusively for the first six months after birth followed by complementary breastfeeding, after evidence showed breastfeeding protects the mother against breast cancer.

It did not recommend dietary supplements as prevention.

"This report is a real milestone in the fight against cancer, because its recommendations represent the most definitive advice on preventing cancer that has ever been available anywhere in the world," said Professor Martin Wiseman, project director of the report.bestfishing

Scientists believe there are several reasons for the link between body fat and cancer.

One is the relationship between excess fat and the hormonal balance in the body.

Research has shown that fat cells release hormones such as estrogen, which increases the risk of breast cancer, while fat around the waist encourages the body to produce growth hormones, which can increase levels of risk.

Evidence of a link is most convincing for cancer of the esophagus, pancreas, colorectum, endometrium (womb), kidney and post-menopausal breast cancer.

The report makes 10 recommendations including 30 minutes of moderate activity a day, rising to 60 minutes; drinking water rather than sugary drinks; eating fruit, vegetables and fiber and limiting salt consumption.

The WCRF report can be found at: http://www.dietandcancerreport.org/

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Emotional eaters -- people who eat when they are lonely or blue -- tend to lose the least amount of weight and have the hardest time keeping it off, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

"We found that the more people report eating in response to thoughts and feelings, the less weight they lost," Heather Niemeier, an obesity researcher at The Miriam Hospital and The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, said in a statement.

"Amongst successful weight losers, those who report emotional eating are more likely to regain," said Niemeier, whose study appears in the journal Obesity.

The study included 286 overweight men and women who were participating in a behavioral weight loss program.

A second group consisted of more than 3,300 adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least one year.

Niemeier and her team analyzed responses to an eating inventory questionnaire.

They focused on people who ate because of external influences, such as people who eat too much at parties, and people who ate farmsalebecause of internal influences, such as feeling lonely or as a reward.

What they found is that the more a person ate for internal reasons, the less weight they lost over time.

"Our results suggest that we need to pay more attention to eating triggered by emotions or thoughts as they clearly play a significant role in weight loss," Niemeier said.

The study was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health

 By Julie Steenhuysen Thu Nov 8, 8:59 AM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Being overweight may not kill you, but it could lead to obesity, U.S. health experts cautioned on Wednesday in response to research suggesting that being a bit heavy does not raise the risk of death.

It also was linked with a significantly decreased rate of death from non-cancer and non-heart related causes, such as accidents or diseases like Alzheimer's.

Experts noted that the research only looked at death rates, not overall health. It did find that obesity was associated with a significantly higher risk of death from heart disease.

"You should not take heart in the idea that if you are only overweight you are OK," said Dr. Robert Kushner, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University who specializes in nutrition and diet.

"Given time, there is a high likelihood you will be obese because people gain weight as they age in this country," Kushner said in a telephone interview.

He said many studies have shown Stock-Photography-Footagethat as one starts gaining weight, health risks develop. "We've done very well at medicating people to keep the medical complications at bay, which allows people to live longer," he said.

The study, conducted by Katherine Flegal of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked at specific causes of deaths in relation to body mass index, a ratio of height and weight.

A BMI of 25 to less than 30 is considered overweight, while a BMI of 30 or greater is considered obese.

The researchers found that people in the overweight category were no more likely than healthy-weight people to develop heart disease or cancer and had far fewer deaths from other causes, such as accidents or diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.

"Among overweight people there were fewer deaths from those causes than expected," Flegal said in a telephone interview.

"There is some evidence that there might be something about nutritional reserves ... that makes you a better able to withstand an adverse situation," she said.

The study did find significant risks linked to obesity, including a higher risk of death from heart disease, diabetes and kidney disease, and several cancers that have been linked with obesity, such as breast, colon and pancreatic cancer.

Flegal said the study was not intended to alter any public health recommendations. "Everybody should eat right, be active and not smoke," she said.

Dr. Louis Aronne, an obesity expert at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said it would be "dangerous as a society to assume it is OK to be overweight."

(Editing by Maggie Fox)

 By ELLIOT SPAGAT, AP Business Writer Thu Nov 8, 8:38 PM ET

SAN DIEGO - Chipmaker Qualcomm Inc. reported Thursday that its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings nearly doubled, but heightened competition and legal troubles hurt profit forecasts — and that sent its shares tumbling.

The world's second-largest supplier of cell phone chips said it expected a profit of between $2.03 and $2.09 a share in the next fiscal year, excluding certain items. That's 4 percent to 7 percent below the average expectation of $2.18 from analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

Qualcomm said it expected its first-quarter profit in fiscal 2008 to land between 50 and 52 cents a share, excluding certain items, compared to an average analyst estimate of 52 cents.

The soft predictions highlight both Qualcomm's struggles to maintain its enormously lucrative business collecting licensing fees and the entry of newer competitors, such as Broadcom Corp., which has scored a number of legal victories against Qualcomm this year.

The San Diego-based company makes chips and it licenses its technology to other handset makers. It has reaped huge profits from the licensing fees for a technology called code division multiple access, or CDMA, which is popular in the United States and Asia. Carriers that use CDMA include Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp.

Qualcomm dominates CDMA but has more a tenuous foothold in the newer fields it is entering, such as wideband CDMA, or WCDMA, which is spreading in Europe.

"Their business model is becoming less profitable," said Edward Snyder, an analyst at Charter Equity Research in San Francisco. "It's a great company, still doing very well, but they're going from an area where they had 100 percent to an area where they don't."

Nokia Corp., the world's largest handset maker, and Qualcomm are locked in a high-stakes legal dispute over how much Qualcomm should get in licensing fees. Complaints from Nokia and other wireless industry heavyweights that Qualcomm's fees are too high have resulted in a slew of lawsuits and trade complaints that Qualcomm plays unfair.

The company said it would spend more than $200 million on legal fees in fiscal 2008, down from the previous year. Steve Altman, Qualcomm's president, said Wall Street's profit forecasts didn't take into account some anticipated payments to customers whose business may be disrupted by Qualcomm's legal battles.

Altman offered no hope of a breakthrough with Nokia on licensing fees.foodgood

"While we continue to speak with them on a fairly regular basis, there really has been no progress," he told analysts on a conference call. "We're pretty far apart."

The dour forecasts overshadowed a strong performance in the fourth quarter.

Qualcomm earned $1.13 billion, or 67 cents per share, during the three-month period ended Sept. 30, up from $614 million, or 36 cents per share, in the same period last year.

The fourth-quarter earnings include a per-share charge of 2 cents from investments, another of 5 cents for stock-based compensation and a gain of 20 cents per share on tax items carried over from previous years.

Excluding those items, Qualcomm earned 54 cents per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected 53 cents per share.

Revenue grew 15 percent to $2.31 billion from $2 billion, above analyst expectations of $2.26 billion.

For the entire fiscal year, Qualcomm earned $3.3 billion, or $1.95 a share, on revenue of $8.87 billion. That compares to a profit of 2.47 billion, or $1.44 a share, on revenue of $7.53 billion the previous year.

 HONG KONG (Reuters) - Scientists in Japan have created two synthetic versions of an ingredient in curry that is noted for its potential to fight cancer.

The scientists wrote in the latest issue of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics that they had synthesized two variations -- GO-Y030 and GO-Y031 -- which have proved more potent and lasting than natural curcumin.

They tested them in mice with colorectal cancer and found that they worked far better.

"Our new analogues (synthetic versions) have enhanced growth suppressive abilities against colorectal cancer cell lines, up to 30 times greater than natural curcumin," said Hiroyuki Shibata, associate professor at Tohoku University's Institute of Development, Ageing and Cancer.

"In a mouse model for colorectal cancer, mice fed with five milligrams of GO-Y030 or GO-Y031 fared 42 and 51 percent better, respectively, than did mice in the control group."

Like curcumin, the two synthetic versions may be able to fight other cancers, bookssuch as gastric cancer and cancer of the breast, pancreas and lung, they added.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Americans spoke out strongly against bosses who fire workers who are obese or smoke, a poll showed Thursday.

But around one-third of poll respondents said employers should be allowed to require staff to attend smoking cessation sessions or weight-loss programs.

"Employers have been making headlines recently for adopting stricter wellness policies in order to control healthcare costs," Harris Interactive's head of healthcare research, Katherine Binns, said in a statement.

"Companies such as Scotts (gardening) and Weyco (healthcare) have fired employees who tested positive for nicotine," the statement said.

A Massachusetts man last year sued Scotts for firing him for smoking on his own time, a report in the Boston Globe said.

His suit said he was unfairly sacked for "engaging in legal activities away from the workplace," the Globe report said.

Michigan-based Weyco instituted a policy in 2005 that allows employees to be laid off if they smoke, regardless of whether they engage in the habit at work or at home.

The company subsequently fired four employees who refused to be tested for nicotine, press reports said, with other reports saying Weyco staff members were fired after tests showed they had nicotine in their blood.

The poll conducted for The Wall Street Journal also showed that the number of Americans who feel the obese and smokers should pay higher healthcare premiums than their non-smoking and slim counterparts was significantly down form last year.

Thirty-seven percent said it was fair for people with unhealthy lifestyles to pay more for health insurance than their healthier counterparts, compared to 53 percent last year.

Eight out of 10 of those who said the unhealthy should carry a bigger health insurance burden also said it was unfair to ask people with healthy lifestyles to subsidize those who choose to smoke or pile on the pounds.

Three-quarters of those polled baby items said they believed higher insurance premiums for unhealthy living could encourage people to live more healthily.

 PARIS (AFP) - A quarter of men and women in 63 countries were found to be obese in a massive study of more than 168,000 people, France's top medical research institute said Monday.

An additional 40 percent of men and 30 percent of women were classified as overweight according to the study, published last week in the US journal of the American Heart Association.

"This is the largest study of this kind every carried out that gives a 'snapshot' measure of obesity using the same methods across the world," said lead researcher Beverly Balkau, a scientist at France's National Institute for Health and Medical Research.

The data was collected in over two half-day periods in each country.

"The results show that we are facing a true epidemic: between 50 and 66 percent of the world's population is either overweight or obese," she said in a communique.

Balkau called on governments to be more aggressive in promoting physical exercise and balanced diets.

The benchmark for obesity is the body-mass index (BMI), defined as one's weight in kilograms divided by the square of one's height in meters.

A BMI from 18.5 up to 25 is considered in the healthy range, from 25 up to 30 is overweight, and 30 or higher is obese.

The rate of obesity varied from one country to the next, ranging from seven percent for both sexes in East and Southeast Asia to 36 percent for men and women in Canada.

Obesityart levels for women topped out at 38 and 40 percent in the Middle East and Africa.

But even in Asia, the study found, the proportion of the adult population that was overweight was roughly the same as in other countries with higher rates of obesity.

Lower levels of obesity in South and East Asia "are not necessarily reassuring, as the impact of adiposity" -- the technical term for excess fat -- "is rising and may be more acute in certain populations," the study said.

Called International Day for Evaluation of Abdominal Obesity, the study showed that the accumulation of midriff fat significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and certain forms of diabetes.

Fifty-six percent of men have waist lines more than 94 centimeters in circumference (36 inches), while 71 percent of women have bellies that measure at least 81 centimeters (32 inches) around.

For men, an increase in waist size of 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) above normal increases the risk of cardiovascular disease by 36 percent. An increase of 15 centimeters (six inches) in women enhances the chances of heart trouble by 40 percent.

The corresponding risks for diabetes are even higher: 59 and 83 percent.

The study was based on an arbitrary sampling of doctor's patients in both rural and urban areas.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists have found how to switch hunger on and off using a molecule that targets the brain -- a discovery which could stop weight loss in terminally ill patients or produce weight loss in the morbidly obese.

When normal and obese mice were treated with MIC-1 they ate less and lost a lot of weight, suggesting that MIC-1 may also be used to treat severe obesity, said the Sydney researchers in a statement received on Tuesday.

"This work has given us a better understanding of the part of the brain that regulates appetite," said Herbert Herzog, director of neuroscience research at the Garvan Institute in Sydney.

"Our bodies send complex chemical signals to our brains, which interpret them and send back responses, in this case eat or don't eat. Our research indicated that MIC-1 is a previously unrecognized molecule sending a don't eat signal to the brain," Herzog said.

The researchers said it was hoped that in the near future, the MIC-1 findings will prevent a sizeable proportion of advanced cancer patients from "literally wasting away."

Sam Breit at St Vincent's Centre for Immunology, who originally cloned the MIC-1 gene, said he believed the findings could have a significant impact on a range of appetite-related disorders.

"Injecting mice with MIC-1 protein also made them stop eating, suggesting that it may be possible to use this to advantage for treating patients with severe obesity," he said.antiques

The MIC-1 findings were published in the latest Nature Medicine magazine and the team of researchers led by St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney hope to develop a human antibody and run clinical trials in the next few years.

 MONDAY, Oct. 22 (HealthDay News) -- The quality of care received by vulnerable elderly Medicare, Medicaid patients is barely acceptable, a team of U.S. researchers report.

The study found that vulnerable elderly patients -- those at risk of death or functional decline -- received only 65 percent of tests and other diagnostic evaluations and treatments recommended for a number of illnesses and conditions, including diabetes and heart disease.

"Thirty-five percent of the medical care interventions they should have received were not provided, indicating significant room for improvement. We'd much rather have everything higher -- say, at least 90 percent," lead author Dr. David S. Zingmond, assistant professor of general internal medicine and health services research at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

One specific example cited by Zingmond and his colleagues: Only 42 percent of patients with diabetes were tested to assess their blood sugar control or received an eye examination during the one-year period covered by the study.blushbulgariburgundybuttonscables

The findings are published in the October issue of the journal Medical Care.

 CHICAGO (Reuters) - Patients who undergo weight-loss stomach surgery have a higher death rate than is true for the general population, including more suicides, perhaps linked to depression, researchers said on Monday.

Dr. Bennet Omalu and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh said a review of more than 16,000 bariatric operations done in Pennsylvania over a nine-year period found a "substantial excess of deaths owing to suicide and coronary artery disease" compared to normal death rates found in the population at large.

"It is very likely that the suicide deaths were ... underestimated because some of the deaths were listed as drug overdoses rather than suicide on the death certificate," Omalu's team wrote in their report, published in the Archives of Surgery.

"The large number of deaths due to suicide and drug overdose, in excess of what we expected, is also a cause for concern. Most of them occurred at least one year after surgery, suggesting that careful follow-up, especially the need to recognize and treat depression, should be provided," they added.banglebangle

There were 440 deaths among the patients, who had an average age of 48 when the operations were performed. About 1 percent of the patients in the study died within a year of the procedures and 6 percent died within five years.

Heart disease was listed as the cause of death in 76 patients -- about 20 percent of the group -- a rate higher than would be common in the general population, the researchers found.

There were 14 suicides, compared to two that would be likely to occur in the population at large in a group of people that size, said the study

Omalu's team said surgery is an effective treatment for severe obesity, with heavily overweight patients often losing 80 percent of their excess body weight within one or two years.

The higher death rates found in the study were likely due to complications caused by obesity itself, from both before and after the surgery, they said.purchasingbarrel

In a second study, Dr. Christopher Still and colleagues at the Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pennsylvania, found that bariatric surgery patients who lost some weight beforehand get out of the hospital quicker.

The study of more than 800 patients who underwent open or laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery between 2002 and 2006 found that those who lost more than 5 percent of their excess body weight before the operation were less likely to stay in the hospital longer than four days compared to those who did not lose weight beforehand.

It also found that those who shed 10 percent of the excess weight ahead of time were more than twice as likely to have lost 70 percent of their excess weight a year later, compared to those who lost none at all.

The researchers said the effect has to do with the beneficial effects of weight loss on high blood pressure, diabetes and other problems.