"When Dr. Morando Soffritti, a cancer researcher in Bologna, Italy, saw the results of his team's seven-year study on aspartame, he knew he was about to be injected into a bitter controversy over this sweetener, one of the most  contentiously debated substances ever added to foods and beverages.

Aspartame is sold under the brand names Nutra-Sweet and Equal and is found in such popular products as Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Snapple and Sugar Free Kool-Aid. Hundreds of millions of people consume it worldwide. And Dr.  Soffritti's study concluded that aspartame may cause the dreaded "c" word: cancer.

The research found that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers in rats that had been given doses of it starting at what would be equivalent to four to five 20-ounce  bottles of diet soda a day for a 150-pound person. The study, which involved 1,900 laboratory rats and cost $1 million, was conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences, a nonprofit  organization that studies cancer-causing substances; Dr. Soffritti is its scientific director."

"So what do women do now? The results of two major studies over the past two weeks have questioned the value of two widely recommended measures: calcium pills and vitamin D to prevent broken bones, and low-fat diets to  ward off heart disease and breast and colon cancer.

Should women abandon hope, since it looks as if nothing works? Abandon guilt and assume diet makes no difference? Or muddle on with salad and supplements, just in case?

The studies - part of the same government research project that in 2002 found hormone treatment for menopause did more harm than good - have confused women and prompted renewed examination of the regimens that many have  been carefully following. Researchers find themselves parsing the results, and debating about how far the scientific rules can be stretched when it comes to measuring results and searching for evidence in smaller groups of patients  within a large study.

... A participant in the government study, Connie Elsaesser, 76, of Cincinnati, said she had mostly given up butter and cut back on cheese and desserts. At times she had cravings, Ms. Elsaesser said, but she had no intention of  resuming old eating habits.

'I've been brainwashed,' she said."

Men who live alone, without a spouse or children, very often die young.  The life-shortening effects of solitary living receive very close attention in a study recently published in Social Science & Medicine by public health researchers  from Karolinska Institute, Umea University, and the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare.

Parsing data for 682,919 men drawn from Swedish national registers for 1985-1990, the authors of the new study calculated mortality rates for five groups: Men living with a spouse (or cohabiting partner) and their children;  single-parent fathers with custody of their children; men living alone, apart from their children; childless men living with a spouse (or cohabiting partner); and childless men living alone.  Sharp differences in mortality rates separated  these five groups, with men living alone, apart from their children, at greatest risk of premature death.  In comparison with men living with a wife (or partner) and their children, fathers living alone-without spouse (or partner) and apart  from their children-experienced "almost 4 times as great a risk of all-cause mortality, 10 times of death from external violence, 13 times from fall and poisoning, almost 5 times from suicide, and 19 times from addiction."

Mortality rates for childless men living alone ran almost as high, with all-cause mortality for such men running 3.4 times as high as that for men living with a spouse (or partner) and children.

Less dramatic, but still notably higher, mortality rates were documented for childless men living with a spouse (or partner) and for single-parent fathers with custody of their children: all-cause mortality for both groups stood at 1.7  times that for men living with a spouse (or partner) and children.

When the Swedish scholars analyzed their data with sophisticated statistical models that compensated for differences in health-selection effects (such as prior disease or illicit drug use) and for differences in socioeconomic status,  they found that the differences in mortality rates for the various family groups were "greatly attenuated."  Nonetheless, even in these sophisticated statistical models, "significantly elevated risks" remained for men living without a  spouse (or partner) and for men living without children.

The Swedish scholars view their findings as confirmation of earlier studies in the United States and Sweden showing "higher mortality among the unmarried" than among the married.  However, the Swedish researchers see in their  results evidence that "having children at home may be at least as important with regard to mortality risk as having a spouse."  In explaining the life-prolonging effects of children in the home, the authors of the new study note that  "children give structure to custodial parents' lives; they provide much needed company and life-meaning, and also access to other adults (neighbors, close kin and friends)."  The Swedish scholars also cite as relevant a 1987  American study showing that "parenting reduce[s] the inclination [for both fathers and mothers] to adopt negative health behaviors more when children and parents live in the same residence than when they live separately."