Many college-age adults are 'at serious risk of developing health problems,' new study finds

• A recent study of 163 students in college found that a startling 27% were overweight, 6% were pre-diabetic, and 10% had either high total cholesterol or low HDL ("good") cholesterol.
• The study was conducted by Terry T.K. Huang, PhD, research assistant professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, and a group of colleagues.
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the metabolic syndrome currently plagues more than 20% of adults in the United States.
• The metabolic syndrome, also called insulin resistance syndrome, puts people at increased risk of type II diabetes and heart disease.
• Experts note that the obesity epidemic has created a pressing need for a better understanding of the problems associated with being overweight in young adults.
• A second study, also authored by Huang, found that one of the challenges in understanding obesity in children and young adults is the unevenness and sometimes implausibility of reported food intake.
• Researchers investigating the role of fatty acids in the aggressiveness of early stage prostate cancer have found that higher concentrations of polyunsaturated fat were linked to less aggressive tumor growth.
• "Research has shown that populations with a low-fat diet have lower rates of prostate cancer, although studies about the types of dietary fat have had mixed results," said Mohsen Meydani, DVM, PhD, director of the Vascular Biology Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, and one of the authors of the new study.
• The study measured the level of fats in prostate tissue from men with localized prostate cancer.
• The study found that those men with less advanced prostate tumors had higher concentrations of overall polyunsaturated fatty acids, and particularly high concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids, than men with more advanced tumors.