If you are short, you will be fat

Being short and having short legs appear to increase the risk of being overweight and developing type 2 diabetes in the middle age, new research shows. “Our study shows that adult stature can be helpful in predicting the risk of diabetes independently from other known risk factors,” researchers report in the journal, Diabetes Care. The length of a person’s legs is an indicator of childhood nutrition, which may have long-lasting effects on health, note Dr Keiko Asao and colleagues from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US. The study included 7,424 men and women aged between 40 and 74 years old. In women, the percentage of body fat was significantly higher in those with shorter height, shorter leg length, and lower leg length-to-height ratio.

High-risk HIV teen subgroups

Among teens who engage in unsafe sex, there are different patterns of behaviour, with some subgroups being much more at risk of HIV infection than others, a new study indicates. The findings suggest that prevention programmes tailored to the needs of these subgroups may have a better chance of success. Says Dr Christopher D. Houck of the Bradley/Hasbro Children’s Research Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the study’s lead author, “If we can develop programmes to target adolescents’ sexual risk in the context of having mental health crises, or also using substances, those are the ways that we’re more likely to have an effect on their risk behaviour.”

Mental health and obesity

Obese people are more likely to have a mood or anxiety disorder compared with individuals who are not obese, says a new study. However, it is not clear if obesity causes these problems or vice versa. “The street probably goes both ways in terms of which comes first or which causes the other,” says Dr Gregory E. Simon of the Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative in Seattle. The study found that the people with body mass indexes of 30 or higher were 21 per cent more likely to have experienced major depression at some point in their lives compared with slimmer individuals.

Vice is always nicer

Being virtuous today may make you miserable tomorrow. The older people get, the more they regret not having given into temptation and having had more fun earlier in life, says a survey in the Journal of Consumer Research, according to The Times. “Although in the short run, vice is regretted more than virtue, in the long run virtue is regretted more,” says the researcher, Ran Kivetz. There’s even a name for this: Hyperopia.