If you're pear-shaped and smug, a new study's findings may take you down a peg: For those at slightly increased risk of developing diabetes, fat stored in the buttocks pumps out abnormal levels of two proteins associated with inflammation and insulin resistance. (And that's not good.)

The new research casts some doubt on an emerging conventional wisdom: that when it comes to cardiovascular and diabetes risk, those of us who carry some excess fat in our hips, thighs and bottoms ("pear-shaped" people) are in far better shape than those who carry most of their excess weight around the middle ("...

The American Cancer Society on Friday urged smokers who have smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 30 years -- and those with a similar history who have quit within 15 years -- to talk to their physician about getting a yearly chest CT scan that can detect lung cancer while it can still be treated. Patients as young as 55 and as old as 74 should consider getting the yearly scans if they are considered at high risk for developing lung cancer, the organization announced.

The influential group's recommendationcomes in the wake of mounting evidence that low-dose spiral CT scans of the chest are...

You’ve likely heard suggestions for making greens without the pork fat or “fried” chicken in the oven. All well and good, but the connection of “soul food” to African Americans goes way beyond editing recipes, and a new film asks viewers to think deeply about why they eat what they eat.

What is soul food? The responses filmmaker Byron Hurt got were remarkable: love, conversation, dinner, but also death and slavery. Fried chicken, mac and cheese, candied yams, greens, cornbread, peach cobbler, sweet iced tea. That wasn’t just dinner; it was sharing tradition,...

The Food and Drug Administration, citing safety concerns, has called on manufacturers of the drug Ambien and its generic equivalents to lower the standard dosages of the insomnia drug now sold, and it is warning physicians that at current dosages, some patients are at risk of impairment in the morning.

The agency cited new data showing that the morning after taking the medication, some patients continued to have blood levels of zolpidem, the active ingredient in Ambien, that could disrupt driving and other activities that require alertness. That problem is more common for women, who clear the...

Anyone who’s gone to too many rock concerts or worked with loud machinery for too long  (or listened to too many kazillion-decibel advertisements at a movie theater) may eventually pay the price: hearing loss caused by damage to tiny, sound-transmitting cells in the inner ear.

Researchers now report they can regenerate some of these crucial  “hair cells” in the inner ears of mice and restore noise-induced damage to some extent. It’s something that hearing scientists have been hoping for ages (though we will avoid using the term “holy grail”). The...

Between 1940 and 1971, many pregnant women were treated with a synthetic estrogen, diethylstilbestrol -- commonly known as DES -- to prevent miscarriage and other complications.

The drug didn’t work for that purpose, but it did have biological effects on the women who took it,  as well as their children.

On Wednesday, four sisters who’d been exposed to DES in the womb reached a settlement with one of the drug’s principal makers, Eli Lilly & Co., during a federal trial in Boston, the Associated Press reported. The women said that the drug had caused their breast cancers and...

Americans live shorter lives -- and are in generally worse health -- than citizens of other wealthy nations, according to an extensive report released Wednesday by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

The analysis of international health data, available here, determined that American men had the lowest life expectancy among men in 17 countries, including wealthy European nations, Australia, Canada and Japan. U.S. women had the second-lowest life expectancy (only Danish women fared worse.) 

The study listed nine health areas in which Americans came in below average:...

Congratulations, America! We’ve become a nation of healthier snackers.

So says market research firm NPD, which has declared fresh fruit the most popular snack food in the country. Even better, the popularity of fresh fruit is continuing to grow.

Over the course of a year, Americans snacked on fresh fruit an average of 10 times more than they snacked on chocolate and 25 times more than they snacked on potato chips, according to NPD’s recent “Snacking in America” report. Fresh fruit, chocolate and potato chips were the top three snack foods identified in the report.

Snack...

It’s not often that you hear someone stand up in front of a microphone and tell the world they have been wrong about a high-profile issue. But that’s exactly what Mark Lynas did last week at the Oxford Farming Conference in Oxford, England, when he renounced his long-held belief that genetically modified foods are dangerous and offered a full-throated defense of the technology as a means of feeding a growing population without devastating the environment. 

“I apologize for having spent several years ripping up GM crops,” Lynas told his receptive audienceon Thursday....

This year’s Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, released online Monday, brought Americans good news and bad. 

Extending a trend since the early 1990s, authors reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that cancer deaths have continued to fall in the United States, with rates declining 1.5% per year for all cancers, in both sexes combined, from 2000 to 2009.  Deaths from the most common cancers — including lung, colon and rectal, breast cancer in women and prostate cancer — fell during that period too, as did the incidence of many forms of the...

Though the Great Recession took a much larger toll on African Americans and Latinos than on whites, members of all three groups were forced to cut back on medical services as a result of the economic downturn, research shows.

Karoline Mertensen and Jie Chen of the University of Maryland’s Department of Health Services Administration wondered whether the recession was having a disproportionate effect on minorities. After all, they noted, by 2009 the unemployment rate among African Americans was 14.8% and 12.1% for Latinos, while remaining at a relatively low 8.7% for whites. Black and...