Although more men are overweight, women are 10 times more likely to dislike their shape and have a distorted body image, researchers said.

Whether it's the fashion industry's obsession with wafer-thin models or media images of slim women selling everything from cars to ice cream, even average-sized women think they are too fat and should lose weight.

"Women are likely to think they are too heavy for their height, even when they have a desirable weight," said Dr Carol Emslie, a researcher at the University of Glasgow. "The ideal female beauty is still being aligned with very thin bodies," she added.

Eating disorders among teenagers and young adults are well documented but Emslie and her team found that problems with body image are also evident in women in their 30s and 40. The researchers calculated the body mass index, a standard measure to gauge obesity, of 3,500 professional men and women from a bank and a university in Scotland. They also asked them whether they thought they were overweight or not.

More than one third of men working at the bank and 34.5 percent at the university were measured as overweight, compared to 20.7 of the women bank employees and less than 30 percent of women at the university.

But men who should have been concerned about their weight and its health implications were not, and women who had no need to worry thought they needed to lose weight. In the study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Emslie found women working at the university were three times more likely that the men who think they were overweight. At the bank, the women were 10 times more likely to think they were overweight. "Our findings suggest that concern about women's perceptions of their body image is well founded," she said.

Another recent survey of more than 2,000 women in Britain revealed that 80 per cent thought big was definitely not beautiful. Many women who were overweight said their excees bulk was ruining their social and sex lives and damaging their careers.

The British Medical Association has criticised the media's image of women and the obsession with stick-thin models. It called for a more realistic body shape to be shown on television and in fashion magazines.

Not everyone needs fancy diagnostic equipment to tell them they're sick. Sometimes, the family dog can do what sophisticated medical equipment cannot. A recent study observed how a border collie sniffed out a cancerous mole on its owner's leg. It constantly sniffed, licked and even fried to bite off the lession. In India, researchers claim that dogs can be trained to smell cancers in people. Another story explains that up to one-third of dogs living with diabetics have the ability to sense when their owners blood sugar levels fall dangerously low if they've taken too much insulin. And some can be trained to detect impending seizures in epileptics, apparently by sensing minute physical changes that precede a seizure and warn their masters of an oncoming attack. Some doctors also described how family dogs were attuned to oncoming seizures. Scientists have many theories to explain, but they really can't say how dogs spot such early signs of illness. Many illnesses induce chemical or hormonal changes, which have profound effects on the body. Dogs may pick up electrical disturbances in the brain, alterations in smell, muscle tremors, or behavioural changes in their owners. They have 200 million scent-receiving cells in their nose, which, if spread out, would cover an area greater than their body surface. Now you know, the next time your dog sniffs you, it could well be a red alert!

Having control over your job may not always be a good thing for your health. By conventional wisdom, more control equals less stress, which in turn leads to better health, or less sickness. But it's not always quite that simple. In the workplace, a combination of factors, like whether you have confidence in your skills and whether you shoulder the blame for problems at work, actually affect your chances of catching a cold, contends a new study from researchers looking into organisational behaviour. It all comes back to stress, they say. "Stress has been linked to suppressed immune system function and to getting colds," says leads researcher John Schaubroeck, head of the management department at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The most likely stress victims, the study says, are employees who have considerable control, but who have little confidence in their abilities, described by Schaubroeck as having "low self-efficacy or little sense of mastery of what you're doing."