Obesity Sparks 8 More Types of Cancer

                Being obese or over weight may lead to eight more types of cancer than previously thought. The eight additional types of cancer identified are – stomach, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, ovary, meningioma (a type of brain tumour), thyroid cancer and the blood cancer multiple myeloma. The findings are based on a review of more than 1,000 studies of excess weight and cancer risk analyzed by WHO’s International Agency for Cancer on Research. Many of the newly identified cancers have not been on people’s radar screens as having a weight component. About 640 million adults and 110 million children are obese worldwide. Lifestyle factors such as eating a healthy diet, maintaining a healthy weight and exercising, in addition to not smoking, can have a significant impact on reducing cancer risk. For most of the cancers on the list, the experts noted a positive dose-response relationship: higher the body mass index, the greater the cancer risk

Knowing Too Much Gives False Memories

                Knowing a lot about something doubles the risk of false memories, scientists said, giving insight into why experts sometimes make errors on their own specialized subjects. People more knowledgeable about a subject were twice as likely to remember incidents relating to that topic that never happened. Researchers asked 489 people to rank seven topics, including football, politics and science form most to least interesting. They then asked if they remembered events described in four news items about the topic they selected as most interesting and four items about the topic they selected as least interesting. The results showed that if someone was interested in a topic, it increased frequency of accurate memories relating to that topic. But it also increased the number of false memories too – 25% of people experienced a false memory related to an interesting topic, compared with 10% related to a less interesting topic. Increasing public understanding of the cause of false memory is an important goal, particularly in light of some of the more negative consequences associated with the phenomenon, including faulty eyewitness accounts and the controversies surrounding false memories of traumatic childhood events. Researchers found that having a high level of knowledge about a topic – rather than just an interest also increased frequency of false memories.