Nine-year-old Martha sits in front of a poster that depicts a single chocolate chip sitting on top of five pounds of grapes. After several weeks participating in a University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing research program on healthy eating and weight management the message is not lost on her. The chocolate chip has the same amount of fat grams as the grapes.

The bottom-line message from a decades-long study of monkeys on a restricted diet is simple: Consuming fewer calories leads to a longer, healthier life. Writing in the journal Science, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the William S.

Elevated insulin levels in the blood appear to raise the risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal women, according to researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Their findings are published in the online version of the International Journal of Cancer. Increased breast cancer risk for postmenopausal women has previously been linked to obesity and diabetes.

Dental disease may be a wake-up call that your diet is harming your body. “The five-alarm fire bell of a tooth ache is difficult to ignore,” says Dr. Philippe P. Hujoel, professor of dental public health sciences at the University of Washington (UW) School of Dentistry in Seattle. Beyond the immediate distress, dental pain may portend future medical problems.

The world-wide explosion of overweight people has been called an epidemic. The inflammatory nature of obesity is widely recognized. Could it really be an epidemic involving an infectious agent? In this climate of concern over the increasing prevalence of overweight conditions in our society, investigators have focused on the possible role of oral bacteria as a potential direct contributor to obesity. To investigate this possibility, the study’s researchers J.M. Goodson, D.