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New study suggests that whole-fat dairy products generally shunned by health experts contain a fatty acid that may lower the risk of type 2 diabetes.

The fatty acid is called trans-palmitoleic acid, according to the study in the Dec. 21 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, and people with the highest blood levels of this fatty acid decrease their odds of diabetes by 62 percent compared to those with the lowest blood levels of it.

In addition, "people who had higher levels of this fatty acid had better cholesterol and triglyceride levels, lower insulin resistance and lower levels of inflammatory markers," said research author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, co-director of the program in cardiovascular epidemiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard School of Public Health.

If you've ever wondered how crazy America's obsession with weight can get, look no further than this strange trend among some fat-fearing parents, mothers who put their babies on diets.

And I'm not talking about pudgy 10-year-olds who think Wii Fit passes for work out. I'm talking babies, under a year old, with chubby cheeks and folds in their thighs — you know, the kind most other people coo over as the picture of health.

According to a recent Good Morning America report, and some Mommy blogs, pediatricians around the country are finding that "more and more parents are putting their babies on diets," even diluting their nutrient-rich principle and breast milk with water, to keep them from getting "fat."

The fear itself is not far-fetched. Dieting babies come at a moment in America's ballooning child obesity epidemic when one in 10 children below the age of 2 is overweight, and experts have come up with a new term to describe the heaviest: "the super-obese," according to the ABC story. So parents today are more consumed than ever with their babies' girth.

An American study questioned over 2,000 women about their size, diet and work out habits and took measurements. It found that many women were often unaware about whether they were a healthy weight or not.

Co-author Dr Mahbubur Rahman, of University of Texas, said: "As obesity numbers climb, many women see overweight as normal, not based on the scale but on how they view themselves."

It was found that 25 per cent of overweight women misjudged their body weight along with 16 per cent of common weight women.

The study was published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

The findings have serious consequences for obesity prevention, the researchers said, as many women do not recognise they are overweight and so will not connect programmes.

The study found that Hispanic and African American women who were overweight thought they were healthy compared with 15 per cent of white women.

The trend was reversed for common weight women who thought they were overweight with fewer Hispanics and African Americans falling into this category than white women.

Healthy weight women who thought they were too fat were twice as likely to skip meals, diet and smoke more cigarettes than the overweight women who thought they were slim.