A new study suggests eating fried and junk foods, that most of us love to gorge on, have enough trans-fats, salt and sugar to lead us to an early onset of obesity and related chronic diseases, in people with genetic risk.

Salt in fried food, however, is not the real problem, but, consuming trans-fats, or the 'bad fats' is a big threat.

A team of US researchers analysed data from 9,623 women in the Nurses' Health Study, 6,379 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and 21,426 women in the Women's Genome Health Study.

Participants filled out food frequency questionnaires, which was based on how often they ate fried food consumption - both at home and away from home. Body mass index (BMI) and lifestyle factors, such as physical activity, were also assessed. Genetic risk scores were calculated based on genetic variants associated with BMI.

The results of the study showed that regular consumption of fried foods was associated with higher BMI, after taking into account other dietary and lifestyle factors.

In addition, the study showed that the association between overconsumption of fried foods and obesity was particularly pronounced among people with a greater genetic predisposition to obesity. On the other hand, the genetic effect on BMI among those who ate fried foods more than four times a week was about twice as large compared with those who ate them less than once a week.

The study has been published in the British Medical Journal.

Many people dieting to reduce flab are put off by low-fat desserts, sauces and salad dressings for one simple reason: they are also low on flavour.

But help is at hand. Researchers have found a way to reduce fat without killing flavour or affecting the appearance and texture of these foods. And these items could soon hit the market.

The key to developing new, better-tasting, more eye-appealing and creamier reduced-fat sauces, desserts and salad dressings could lie in adjusting their calcium and acidity levels, according to a new study.

The study was conducted as part of the 247th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.

As part of the study, the team reduced the fat content and calories in a model white sauce from 10 percent to 2 percent without sacrificing the look and feel of the food, an ACS statement said.

"By controlling pH and calcium content, we are able to regulate the interactions among fat droplets," Bicheng Wu, a graduate student and a member of the study team, was quoted as saying.

"This makes them stick together and form flocs, or clumps. We believe the water trapped inside these flocs makes the sauce seem fattier than it really is and preserves the look, feel and flavor."

Wu explained that fat plays various roles in determining the overall sensory attributes of food products.

"It carries flavors, so cutting the fat content lessens the intensity of the flavor. The appearance, meaning the opacity or lightness, of a food mixture largely depends on light scattering by fat droplets, so high fat content gives a milky appearance to a sauce or dressing."

She added that high fat content is also related to the thick, smooth and creamy feel in your mouth of many products, like pudding, due to the effect of fat droplets on how the liquid flows.

Yet another problem with cutting the fat content is that it doesn't make people feel as full, said D. Julian McClements of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and team leader.

"Due to the high calorie count in fat and how the body digests it, fat also affects the feeling of satiety," Wu said.

"Often we see people reacting to the texture of our low-fat sauce sample even before they taste it," he said. "They say, 'Wow! No way it's only 2 percent fat. It looks like custard! Can I try it?'"

McClements said the team soon plans extensive taste and smell tests. "Then we will be able to adjust the composition and incorporate other seasoning ingredients into the foods.

"Since this fat reduction is easy for us now, and the fact that our new products contain healthy ingredients that can be used in a wide range of products means there's a great potential to reach the market in the near future."

Scientists have created at least five new experimental substances, based on a tiny protein found in cone snail venom, that could someday lead to the development of safe and effective oral medications for treatment of chronic nerve pain.

They say that the substances could potentially be stronger than morphine, with fewer side effects and lower risk of abuse.

"This is an important incremental step that could serve as the blueprint for the development of a whole new class of drugs capable of relieving one of the most severe forms of chronic pain that is currently very difficult to treat," David Craik, Ph.D., who led the study, said.

His presentation is one of more than 10,000 scheduled to occur at the 247th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.

Craik, who is at the University of Queensland, explained that acute pain occurs when the nervous system is stimulated by a wound or injury and naturally subsides over time. In contrast, chronic neuropathic pain kicks in when the nervous system itself is damaged.

This type of pain - which is often triggered by diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases - can last for months, years or even decades. Current treatments for chronic neuropathic pain have serious side effects and provide relief to only about one in every three patients, he said.

One possible solution that Craik and his colleagues are investigating comes from an unlikely source, the cone snail.

Cone snails are marine animals that use venom to paralyze their prey. This venom contains hundreds of peptides (small proteins) known as conotoxins. But in humans, Craik says some of these conotoxins appear to have analgesic effects.

So far, however, only one conotoxin-derived medication has been approved for human use. This drug, ziconotide, has one big drawback: It has to be infused directly into the lower part of the spinal cord - a clearly invasive procedure.

The team is working to develop a conotoxin-based drug that can be taken orally, which would be much more practical for patients. In previous research, they found a way to modify conotoxin peptides so they formed circular chains of amino acids. As a result, the modified peptides - which are essentially tied into a loop - are extremely stable and resistant to enzymes in the body.

In laboratory rats, a common stand-in for humans in many experiments, a single, small oral dose of a prototype drug based on one of these looped conotoxins appeared to significantly reduce pain, as measured by a standard protocol.

Based on this research, the scientists concluded that this prototype drug was about 100 times more potent than morphine or gabapentin, the two drugs that are considered the "gold standard" treatments for chronic nerve pain.

People who have had common skin cancers may be at an increased risk of developing melanoma and 29 other cancer types, a new study has warned.

Individuals who had nonmelanoma skin cancer (NMSC) were at increased risk for subsequently developing other cancer types, and this association was much higher for those under 25 years of age, researchers said.

NMSC is the most common type of skin cancer. It is relatively easy to treat if detected early, and rarely spreads to other organs, they said.

"Our study shows that NMSC susceptibility is an important indicator of susceptibility to malignant tumours and that the risk is especially high among people who develop NMSC at a young age," said Rodney Sinclair, professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

"The risk increases for a large group of seemingly unrelated cancers; however, the greatest risk relates to other cancers induced by sunlight, such as melanoma," said Sinclair.

Compared with people who did not have NMSC, those who did were 1.36 times more likely to subsequently develop any cancer, including melanoma and salivary gland, bone, and upper gastrointestinal cancers.

Survivors younger than 25 years of age, however, were 23 times more likely to develop any cancer other than NMSC.

In particular, they were 94 and 93 times more likely to get melanoma and salivary gland cancer, respectively.

"Our study identifies people who receive a diagnosis of NMSC at a young age as being at increased risk for cancer and, therefore, as a group who could benefit from screening for internal malignancy," said Sinclair.

Researchers hypothesised that people who develop skin cancers later in life do so as a result of accumulated Sun exposure, while those who develop skin cancer at a younger age may do so as a result of an increased susceptibility to cancer in general.

To investigate this, they stratified the risk ratios by age and discovered that young people with NMSC are more cancer-prone.

The researchers constructed two cohorts: one of 502,490 people with a history of NMSC, and a cohort of 8,787,513 people who served as controls.

They followed up with the participants electronically for five to six years, and 67,148 from the NMSC cohort and 863,441 from the control group subsequently developed cancers.

They found that for those who had NMSC, the relative risk for developing cancers of the bladder, brain, breast, colon, liver, lung, pancreas, prostate, and stomach remained consistently elevated for the entire period of the study, and the risk for cancers of the brain, colon, and prostate increased with time.

The study was published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Bio-mar

Anyone with blood pressure that is higher than the optimal 120/80 reading may be more likely to have a stroke, according to a new analysis.

The meta-analysis looked at research on the risk of developing stroke in people with 'prehypertension' or blood pressure higher than optimal but lower than the threshold to be diagnosed with high blood pressure, which is 140/90 mmHg.

"These findings, if confirmed, have important takeaways for the public. Considering the high proportion of the population who have higher than normal blood pressure, successful treatment of this condition could prevent many strokes and make a major difference in public health," explained study author Dingli Xu of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China.

A total of 19 prospective cohort studies with more than 760,000 participants were included in the analysis and participants were followed for time periods ranging from four to 36 years.

From 25 to 54 percent of study participants had pre-high blood pressure.

The analysis found that people with pre-high blood pressure were 66 percent more likely to develop a stroke than people who had normal blood pressure.

The results were the same after researchers adjusted for other factors that could increase the risk of stroke, such as high cholesterol, diabetes and smoking.

The researchers determined that nearly 20 percent of strokes in the study population were due to pre-high blood pressure.

The analysis also divided people with prehypertension into high and low groups, with blood pressure over 130/85 in the high range.

Those in the high range had a greater risk of stroke than those in the low range.

Those in the high range were 95 percent more likely to develop a stroke than those with normal blood pressure, while those in the low range were 44 percent more likely.

"Prehypertension should be managed with changes in diet and exercise to help reduce the risk of stroke," Xu noted in the study published in the journal Neurology.