The fruit, they said, appears to boost levels of oestrogen, a hormone associated with breast cancer.
The grapefruit study follows reports earlier this year that alcohol consumption raises breast cancer risk in women and that the consumption of fatty junk food elevates the risk of a range of cancers.
MEDTRONICA
Drugs
www.drugs.com
An A-to-Z compendium of more than 24,000 drugs, providing brief but informative details about intended purpose, what a doctor should tell you or what you should ask and possible side effects.
STORIES FOR THE WAITING ROOM
True story: A customer complained to a pharmacist that the capsules he'd been given weren't working. The pharmacist replied: "Oh, you've been taking them the wrong way. You have to take them so that the green half goes in first."
The customer returned a week later to say his medication was now working fine.
BODY OF KNOWLEDGE
The number of chews per minute while eating ranges from 49 to 120, with the average being 70 to 80.
GET ME THAT. STAT!
The British Medical Journal has estimated that smoking one cigarette takes 11 minutes off the average person's life.
The world's speed record for eating glazed doughnuts is 49 in eight minutes, held by Eric "Badlands" Booker.
PHOBIA OF THE WEEK
Pteronophobia - fear of being tickled with feathers.
BEST MEDICINE
Q: How many surgeons does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. If you're having trouble with the bulb, it could be the socket, which may cause you to have problems in the future. Therefore, the surgeons will remove the socket.
HYPOCHONDRIAC'S GUIDE
A study a few years back by researchers at Oxford University in England concluded that hypochondria can be contagious. They studied 227 women who regularly visited their doctors with medically unexplained symptoms.
They found that these women take their children to doctors much more often than other mothers and that the children complained more frequently of stomach troubles than their peers.
OBSERVATION
Hospital rooms seem to have vastly more ceiling than any rooms people live in.
- Author Bertha Damon
LAST WORDS
I think it's time for the morphine.
- English writer D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
GET BACK TO EXERCISE
When your back hurts, getting off the sofa may be the last thing you want to do, but do it anyway. UCLA researchers found that back patients who exercised regularly were 31% less likely to have an increase in pain than sedentary patients.
Those who did physical therapist-recommended back exercises were more likely to complain of a pain increase, probably because they were doing them incorrectly.
SIMILARITIES OF THE SEXES
If men are from Mars, then so are women, says Janet Hyde, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin. She reviewed 46 studies involving millions of people and concluded that men and women are very similar when it comes to measures of self-esteem, leadership ability, communications and mathematical thinking. She hopes that debunking such stereotypes will reduce the misunderstandings they cause.
- Compiled by R.J. Ignelzi
