The Community Preventive Services Task Force (Task Force) recommends the use of combined diet and physical activity promotion programs to provide counsel and support to patients at increased risk for type 2 diabetes. A systematic review of 53 studies describing 66 programs found strong evidence that such programs are effective for reducing new onset diabetes. A separate review of economic evidence (28 studies) found these interventions to be cost-effective. The recommendation statement and evidence reviews are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Protein trumps carbohydrate and fat as the regulated parameter driving human food consumption:

Kevin Hall and Carson Chow published their estimation (in 2010) that the rise of obesity prevalence in the U.S. since the 1970s can be attributed to an increase in consumption of just seven calories per day per person. This is calculated by taking the average increase of energy stored in the heavier adult bodies of the present day, divided by the very long time frame it took for the change to occur.

Researchers have built a simulation to show how cancerous tumors manipulate blood-vessel growth for their own benefit.

Like all cells, those in tumors need access to the body's fine network of blood vessels to bring them oxygen and carry away waste. Tumors have learned to game the process called angiogenesis in which new vessels sprout from existing ones, like branches from a tree.

But some details have been hidden until now.

New research at Rice University shows how tumors create chaos in the development of neighboring blood vessels, causing them to grow too quickly and not form properly. Credit: Marcelo Boareto/Rice University

The reported observation of a resonant state of a J/psi meson and a proton in the decay of the Lambda_b baryon by the LHCb collaboration, broadcast by CERN today, is a very intriguing new piece of the puzzle of hadron spectroscopy - a topic on which many brilliant minds have spent their life in the course of the last half century.

By Rebecca Boyle, Inside Science -- When light bulbs colonize our homes, humans get much less sleep.

It's an intuitive idea, but a new study measures this effect in a real-life situation for the first time by examining hunter-gatherers in Argentina.

Communities with access to electric lighting have shifted their bedtimes to later in the evening, curtailing a normal night of shuteye.

"When you have access to electricity, you can decide when you turn the lights off, and that resets your biological clock," said Horacio de la Iglesia, a biologist at the University of Washington, in Seattle, who led the study.

Even a short period of inactivity can be extremely bad for our bones, and for astronauts facing months in zero gravity, the risks are serious.

But there is an animal that has already solved all of the problems faced by immobile humans - black bears who hibernate for six months at a time. 

When you can be arrested for letting your children go to the park alone, we might be a little hyper-vigilant, yet on the other side multiple times per week there is indignation that child protective services failed to stop some idiot parents who were harming a child. It may be the precautionary principle run amok but doctors and government workers are the people who will be sued if they are not going overboard looking for problems.

Blind cavefish that have adapted to annual cycles of starvation and binge-eating have mutations in the gene MC4R, the same gene that is mutated in certain obese people with insatiable appetites, according to a new study in PNAS which reveals more about how vertebrates evolved to have different metabolisms from one another and could provide insights into the relationship between human obesity and disease.

As the name suggests, Mexican cavefish live in dark, isolated caves in northeastern Mexico. In the hundreds of thousands of years since they were separated from their surface-dwelling cousins, they have adapted to their harsh environment in several ways.

The CERN Director General Rolf Heuer issued the following statement today, reporting the discovery of exotic pentaquark states by the LHCb collaboration:

Geneva, 14 July 2015. Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has reported the discovery of a class of particles known as pentaquarks. [...]
 

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is making $100 million per year scaring people about food and other science. It isn't helping the public be any safer, it is just making people enjoy food less, according to a new study.