THOSE annoying people who seem able to eat absolutely anything and not put on an ounce aren’t just lucky, they have a special sneaky gene that makes them resistant to fat, scientists have discovered.

US government investigators report that more than one person in ten has the gene variant, which enables them to consume dietary fat while hardly having to worry about their waistlines.

The study, in the Journal of Molecular Medicine, used data from one of the world’s largest and longest-running population surveys, the Framingham Heart Study, to find that a fortunate 13 per cent of us have a variation on our apolipoprotein A5 gene (APOA5), which causes resistance to obesity.

The lead researcher, José Ordovas, of Tufts University, says these people “can eat any combination of food and maintain a healthy BMI”. The finding does not promise to create gene therapies to enable us to eat all we like, but it does push the frontier of gene-related eating.

“In future we may be able to develop several sets of guidelines for the public, based on a person’s genotype,” says Ordovas. But he also cautions that people with the lucky gene shouldn’t just sit endlessly scoffing all day. If they do gain weight, it can be harder for them to lose it. Hooray.

Discovered: how calm can beat cancer

HERE’S the most compelling reason ever to relax . . . it really does improve your chances against cancer, says a breakthrough study.

Complementary therapists have long claimed that cutting stress can boost people’s recovery from cancer, but no one has been able to identify any firm clinical reason. Now scientists at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, say it’s not the relaxation itself that helps, it’s avoiding one particular stress hormone.

Their experiments show that the hormone epinephrine causes changes in prostate and breast cancer cells that seem to make them resistant to cell death, or apoptosis, the mechanism that should prevent the lethal cells from multiplying. Epinephrine is made by our adrenal glands in response to stress, and levels remain chronically raised in anxious or depressed people.

This may explain why men on blood-pressure drugs that block the hormone have a lower risk of prostate cancer.

Professor George Kulik, the senior researcher, says in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that his tests indicate that being chronically uptight may present a double-edged danger: “Stress may both contribute to the development of cancer and may also reduce the effectiveness of cancer treatments.”

Fruit of the womb

AN APPLE a day may keep the next generation’s doctors at bay. Children whose mums ate plenty of apples during pregnancy have a significantly lower risk of asthma, says a five-year follow-up study of 2,000 mums in Thorax by Scottish and Dutch scientists. The cause has not been fully explored but scientists think that flavonoids in the fruit may have a protective effect.

Sex and cigarettes

COULD cigarettes be behind a 30-year global decline in the birth of boys? Pittsburgh University investigators report this week in Environmental Health Perspectives that the past three decades have seen a significant fall in the ratio of boys born compared with girls.

They say they have no explanation but, also this week, a study by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine claims that couples who smoke around the time they conceive are almost twice as likely to have a girl. Pregnant women exposed to passive smoke are also more likely to have a girl, says the five-year study of 9,000 pregnancies.

Forget childhood

BRAVE-NEW world alert: having long-term memories of your childhood and other formative events hinders your ability to cope with modern life’s rush of short-term demands, neurologists report.

Columbia University brain researchers say their lab tests show that when our brains get busy maintaining long-term memories, they are less efficient at running “working memory”, the short-term functioning that enables us to multi-task hurriedly.

Gaël Malleret, one of the scientists, says that using drugs to block neurogenesis, the formation of memory neurons in the brain’s hippocampus, “helps people to forget old and useless information sooner and enables them to take in new information faster”.

How long before the first commercial antirecall drugs?

Big bucks

SHORT single men should not blame their statures for their lovelorn status, just their lack of cash. A Chicago University study of women speed-daters’ habits, revealed by The New York Times, shows that girls are happy to trade inches for income: men who are 5ft 10in (1.78m) have to earn £16,000 more than a 6ft man to be considered as sexy. A 5ft man would need to earn £164,000 more to have the exact same chance of a date. No wonder jockeys are so competitive

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