A regular exercise in your daily routine may cut the risk of colon cancer in men.

Anne McTiernan, MD, PhD, of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said in a news release “Vigorous exercise was helpful for men of any size, as long as they worked out nearly every day,” McTiernan’s team studied 102 men and 100 women aged 40-75 years (average age: mid-50s) who had had a colonoscopy within the past three years. When the study started, participants were healthy but sedentary. They took a treadmill test to gauge their maximum heart rate.

Then the researchers gave half the group heart rate monitors and an exercise prescription:

–Get an hour of aerobic exercise six days weekly for a year.

–Workouts should be moderate to vigorous, at 60 percent to 85 percent of maximum heart rate.

For comparison, the researchers didn’t assign the other participants to exercise. All participants were asked to not change their diets. After a year, participants got flexible sigmoidoscopy tests. In flexible sigmoidoscopy, doctors guide a thin, flexible tube with a tiny camera through the lower colon to check for abnormal growths, such as polyps, which might become cancerous. They found substantially less evidence of cell proliferation in those colon areas for men who had followed the researchers’ exercise prescription, compared with the study’s other men. Treadmill tests showed that the exercisers had improved their aerobic fitness. Men with the biggest gains in aerobic fitness had the least cell proliferation in the colon crypts.

Researchers believe that eating oranges can actually cut the risk of developing a lung cancer or some other disease.

Japanese scientists found the key were vitamin A compounds called carotenoids which give the fruit its orange color.

In the first study, scientists surveyed 1,073 people in the Japanese town, Mikkabi, in Shizuoka, who ate a high number of mandarin oranges. They found chemical markers in the population’s blood samples that were linked to a lower risk of liver disease, arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and insulin resistance (a condition associated with diabetes).

A second study found that drinking mandarin juice appeared to cut the chance of developing liver cancer in patients with chronic viral hepatitis.

After a year, no liver cancer was found in the group, compared to a rate of 8.9% among a group of 45 patients with the same condition who did not drink the juice. Meanwhile, scientists believe they have taken another step closer to preventing antibiotic-resistant infections from spreading.

The Japanese researchers admit more work is needed and plan to continue the study for five years. The findings could lead to new drugs to fight infections that commonly cause death in people with AIDS or cystic fibrosis, they said.