Evidence of a link between fatty foods and breast cancer is mounting with new research showing that eating high fat milk, cheese, butter and meat may raise the odds of developing the disease.

Scientists at the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Charity Cancer Research, UK found that women who had eaten more than 90 grams of fat a day had double the risk of breast cancer of those who had had half that amount. The British study, published in The Lancet, is the second in less than a week linking a high-fat diet with the biggest cancer killer in women.

"It is emerging evidence of a link", said Dr Sheila Bingham of the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit in Cambridge who conducted the British study. "The effect seems to be related particularly to saturated fat found mostly in high fat milk, meat and some cereals such as biscuits and cakes," she said.

Bingham and her team studied detailed food diaries of 13,000 older women in Norfolk, who took part in a study between 1993-1997.

There was good news for lovers of pizza when a study revealed that eating the hugely popular meal-on-a-plate on a regular basis could help stave off certain forms of cancer.

The eating habits of Italians suffering from cancer of the stomach or digestive tract were monitored during the study and compared with a sample of about 5,000 people suffering from other diseases, La Repubblica reported.

The results showed that people who ate pizza once or several times a week were less likely to get cancer than those who chose not to eat it at all. The secret, according to Silvano Gallus, appeared to be connected to the preventive properties of the tomato. "We knew that tomato sauce could offer protection against certain tumours, but we did not expect pizza as a complete meal also to offer such protective powers," he said.

However, there is nothing to indicate that pizza is the only thing responsible for these results, say doctors.

A strict vegetarian diet can reduce high cholesterol levels about as effectively as cholesterol fighting drugs called statins, researchers said.

The diet containing natural plant sterols found in plants, vegetables, fruits, almonds and vegetable oils, and viscous fibres found in oats, barley and psyllium, was credited with reducing "bad" cholesterol levels by 29 per cent over four weeks in a group of 16 subjects.

Another group of study participants who took a daily dose of 20 miligrams of the drug lovastatin lowered their cholesterol levels by a comparable 31 per cent over four weeks, and a third group on a low-fat diet cut their cholesterol by 8 per cent.

The findings suggested that patients with high choleterol try a dietary approach for six to 12 weeks before turning to cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr James Anderson of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Dietary management is an essential part of the treatment for lipid disorders, although adherence to strict and intensive dietary interventions requires motivation by patients, encouragement by physicians and, perhaps, counselling by dietitians and nutrition experts," Anderson wrote.

Study author David Jenkins wrote : "Using the experience gained, further development of this approach may provide a potentially valuable dietary option for cardiovascular disease risk reduction in primary prevention."

With over a million people around the globe suffering from allergy to peanuts, researches have achieved a breakthrough in evolving an allergy-free variety of the crop. Scientists at the US Department of Agriculture have discovered a peanut variety lacking one of the major allergens. By cross-breding it to popular eating peanuts, the researchers hope to take a first step towards producing an allergy-free supermarket nut.

Stay happy and stay away from the common cold. A new study in Psychosomatic Medicine has found that people who are energetic, happy and relaxed are less likely to catch a cold than those who are depressed, nervous or angry.

Study participants who had a positve emotional style weren't infected as often and experienced fewer symptoms compared to people with a negative emotional style, says Sheldon Cohel of the Carnegie Mellon University. "We found that experiencing positive emotions was associated with greater resistance to developing a common cold. Increases in positive emotional styles were linked with decreases in the rate of clinical colds," he said.