For years researchers have found a link between sleep deprivation and obesity and a new study has found that sleeping less may make you eat more.

Much of the previous research has looked at people with a high BMI (body mass index) but French researchers have found that shortened sleep gives normal-weight men the munchies too.

In fact, cutting their sleep time from eight hours a night to four hours resulted in the participants wolfing down a Big Mac’s worth of extra calories during the day.

A new study suggests that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables may not offer much protection against cancer.

For years the public health message in New Zealand has been the World Health Organisation’s recommendation to eat “five plus a day”, with the assumption that eating at least five servings of vegetables and fruits per day is good for your health.

Brain-bending points calculations are a big no-no if you want to stick to your diet, according to a new study that suggests simpler is better when it comes to dieting.

The finding comes from a study of 390 German women who were either given a simpler plan featuring shopping lists and a meal plan or a more complex plan involving assigning point values to each food and sticking to a daily limit.

A new study from the US National Institute of Health shows that if you want to lose weight, the type of food you eat is less important than the amount of calories you consume.

The two year study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave 811 overweight people aged between 30 and 70 one of four different styles of calorie-controlled diets and found that everyone lost the same amount of weight.

In each of the four groups, eaters averaged a weight loss of six kilos within six months.