Most people eat broccoli for its anti-cancer properties. But did you know that boiling or microwaving broccoli could render it useless?

According to a recent study, broccoli or cruciferous vegetables, if not prepared properly can alter their cancer fighting powers.

Broccoli is an excellent source of sulforaphane, a phytochemical (naturally occurring plant compound) that has been shown to have great cancer fighting properties.

The enzyme myrosinase in broccoli is needed for sulforaphane to form and boiling or microwaving the vegetable for one minute or less destroys a majority of the enzyme.

Boiling vegetables for long also leads to loss of water-soluble vitamins, such as vitamin C, folate and niacin that leach into the water.

The researchers found that the best way to retain the anti-cancer properties of broccoli is to steam it for up to five minutes.

Other than anti-cancer properties including broccoli in your diet can help prevent osteoarthritis, arterial inflammation, reduce levels of cholesterol and triglycerides and ease premenstrual tension.

Many studies have in the past shown how cooking habits greatly influence the nutrition value of food. So, opt for healthy cooking habits to stay healthy.

Australian scientists say they have discovered a ground-breaking technique for treating aggressive forms of leukaemia.

The medical researchers at Melbourne-based Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre have found a double-barrelled approach which would hopefully lead to long-term survival of those suffering from the blood cancer, according to a media report.

A mutant enzyme called JAK2 drives and feeds a virulent form of the disease that has proved resistant to therapy.

"Not only do they grow very quickly and the tumours spread more rapidly but they're often refractory to standard chemotherapies up front," Ricky Johnstone of Peter MacCallum Centre said.

"These are things that are very difficult to treat because of how quickly they spread but, in addition, they cannot be treated by the common chemotherapy," he said.

However, the dual-pronged attack has already proved successful in completely curing this form of leukaemia in mice.

Johnstone said "If we think about a tumour cell as a tree and if we think about this JAK2 protein being the tree, what we want to do is target that tree at two points: we want to cut off the leaves with one drug and then we want to deplete the root system and, importantly, the tap-root at another level.

"We think that the best way to kill that tree and therefore the tumour cell would be this dual approach - remove the leaves, remove the roots and then completely diminish the survival and nourishment pathway for that tree and, therefore, kill the tumour cell."

Researchers hope the treatment will be available to patients within a year.

Doctors who specialize in treating head pain, such as chronic migraines, are the latest to list the procedures and treatments they think have risks or costs that may outweigh the benefits to patients.

The American Headache Society's list is part of the Choosing Wisely campaign from the ABIM Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation established by the American Board of Internal Medicine. The campaign has seen cancer doctors, eye doctors and chest surgeons naming the overused or unproven practices their peers should avoid and patients should question.

The newest Choosing Wisely list was published Thursday in the journal Headache.

"The article and recommendations identify situations that are felt by experts to be cases where patients and doctors should think very carefully before they decide to use that particular treatment or intervention," said Dr. Elizabeth Loder, an author of the new recommendations.

Loder is the president of the American Headache Society, and chief of the Division of Headache and Pain at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

All tests and treatments have risks, Loder said. For example, imaging techniques such as CT scans expose patients to potentially cancer-causing radiation, and certain pain medications sometimes used to treat headaches are easy to get hooked on.

The goal of the recommendations is to encourage discussion between patients and their doctors about which tests are overall beneficial to patients, she said.

"The purpose is to start a conversation about situations, tests, procedures and interventions that do not necessarily benefit the patient, and sometimes can even cause problems," Loder said.

To come up with the recommendations, Loder and her coauthors asked physician members of the American Headache Society (AHS) to identify tests and treatments they view as being used incorrectly or too often, and which methods of care had benefits too small to outweigh the risks.

The researchers evaluated more than 100 items suggested by AHS members, distilling the list down to five items based on current evidence.

The guidelines advise against imaging the brains of patients who get headaches that have not changed over time.

They also discourage the long-term use of over-the-counter pain pills to treat headaches, and recommend that physicians avoid using certain pain medications - opioids like oxycodone and drugs containing butalbital like Fioricet - for patients who get headaches often.

Finally, physicians should not perform computed tomography, or CT, on a patient with a headache when magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, is available, except if it's an emergency, the recommendations state.

The recommendations, Loder said, "are a nice distillation for patients when thinking about their care." Patients and their families can use the guidelines to start a conversation with their doctor about the pros and cons of a given test or procedure.

"In addition to thinking about the good things that may come about from interventions, it's also important to think about situations in which caution can be used," Loder said.

People who eat a diet rich in nuts, including peanuts, are less likely to die from heart disease or cancer, new research suggests.

The more nuts consumed, the greater the apparent benefit, according to the report. It included data from nurses and other health professionals who have been tracked since the 1980s.

Heart disease and cancer - the biggest killers in the U.S. - are responsible for more than one million annual deaths nationwide.

The International Tree Nut Council Nutrition Research and Education Foundation helped pay for the new report, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings dovetail with other research suggesting regularly eating nuts may lower the risk of common health problems such as heart disease, colon cancer and type 2 diabetes.

"Nuts used to be demonized because they're high in fat. Now, 20 years later, they're recognized as a healthful food," Jeffrey Blumberg said.

He is from the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston and wasn't part of the study team.

"It's just like coffee and eggs used to be demonized," Blumberg said. "Eggs used to be a heart attack in a shell. Nuts are high in fat, but they're high in good fats."

The new study - the largest to look at deaths - suggests the health benefits of nuts may translate to a lower risk of premature death, researchers said.

The variety of nut, including peanuts, which are actually legumes, did not seem to make a difference, senior author Dr. Charles Fuchs said.

"The benefit really seems to span across nuts," Fuchs, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said.

The two databases used in the analysis included about 76,000 women who are part of the ongoing Nurses' Health Study and 42,000 men who are regularly evaluated as part of the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The findings are based on questionnaires in which the volunteers periodically recalled their eating habits.

The researchers had to account for the fact that nut eaters tended to be healthier when it came to smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity, exercise habits and other elements of their diet, such as eating more fruits and vegetables.

Yet even when those factors were taken into account, they said, nut consumption seemed to be tied to a lower risk of early death.

During 30 years of the Nurses' Health Study, about 16,000 women died. About 11,000 men died over a 24-year period in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

Compared to people who never ate nuts, those who ate nuts once a week were 11 percent less likely to die during the studies and those who ate nuts every day were 20 percent less likely to die.

People who reported eating nuts at least five times per week were 29 percent less likely to die of heart disease, in particular, than those who avoided nuts. They were also 24 percent less likely to die of respiratory conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 11 percent less likely to die of cancer.

Nuts were not linked to fewer deaths from stroke, neurodegenerative disease, infection or kidney disease. Nor were they tied to a lower risk of dying from diabetes, even though some research has suggested nuts may have a benefit in that disease.

Fuchs said his personal recommendation is that people eat an ounce of nuts each day, although smaller amounts still seem to make a difference.

The study also suggests people who eat a lot of nuts are less likely to put on weight.

It's possible that people who like nuts tend to have a thinner body type, "but even after adjusting for lifestyle choices, we definitely see that people who eat nuts tend to be thinner and are less likely to be obese," Fuchs said.

It's not clear whether salted or spiced nuts are less beneficial than raw ones, the researchers noted.

Fuchs and his colleagues also cautioned that the study can't prove nuts were responsible for the lower risk of death. "However," they said, "our data are consistent with a wealth of existing observational and clinical-trial data in supporting the health benefits of nut consumption for many chronic diseases."

A new study has found that women who go to sleep and woke up at same time every day had lower body fat.

Brigham Young University exercise science professor Bruce Bailey studied more than 300 women from two major Western US universities over the course of several weeks and found that those with the best sleeping habits had healthier weight.

The study found that getting less than 6.5 or more than 8.5 hours of sleep per night is associated with higher body fat and that quality of sleep is important for body composition.

Women in the study were first assessed for body composition, and then were given an activity tracker to record their movements during the day and their sleep patterns at night. Researchers tracked sleep patterns of the participants (ages 17-26) for one week.

The most surprising finding from the study, according to the researchers, was the link between bed time and wake time consistency and body weight.

Study participants who went to bed and woke up at, or around the same time each day had lower body fat. Those with more than 90 minutes of variation in sleep and wake time during the week had higher body fat than those with less than 60 minutes of variation.

Wake time was particularly linked to body fat: Those who woke up at the same time each morning had lower body fat. Staying up late and even sleeping in may be doing more harm than good, Bailey said.

Bailey related consistent sleep patterns to having good sleep hygiene. When sleep hygiene is altered, it can influence physical activity patterns, and affect some of the hormones related to food consumption contributing to excess body fat.

Bailey and his team also found there was a sweet spot for amount of sleep: Those who slept between 8 and 8.5 hours per night had the lowest body fat.

The study findings have been published online in the American Journal of Health Promotion.