Slavish eating, child obesity, and green bananas: what the researchers found

Life may have been harsh in the desert quarries of ancient Rome, but the labourers managed a River Cafe diet all the same.

They supped off wheat, lentils, dates, onions, garlic, olives, coriander, donkey meat and wine carried from the Nile valley, and fish transported from the Red sea. They grew their own lettuce, mint, cress, beet and even cabbage.

Their meals were pepped up with artichokes, hazelnuts, walnuts, pine nuts, pomegranates, almonds, figs, water melon, cucumber and even pepper from India, according to Marijke van der Veen, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester.

Working in the quarries of imperial Rome, once depicted as a cruel existence for slaves and conscripts, now looks more like an episode of Carry On Up the Trattoria, after a study of the litter from two sites in the Red sea mountains of Egypt's eastern desert.

Archaeologists sifting among the leftovers found a basket, shoes, ropes, cords, animal and fish bones, fruits, seeds, chaff and straw. Researchers identified 55 food plants and 20 sources of animal protein. The biggest surprise was the seeds.

"The presence of seeds can only point to one thing: gardening. The workers and soldiers must have preferred their greens fresh, rather than wilted after a week's journey through the desert," Dr van der Veen told the British Association science festival at Leicester yesterday.

· Obesity is growing among the young at such a rate that parents could outlive their children.

Childhood obesity has become alarmingly common in the US, and type two diabetes - which used to be called adult onset diabetes - is now being reported from paediatric clinics, according to Andrew Prentice of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine.

An epidemic that had begun in America was now spreading through the world, with high levels of obesity reported in eastern Europe, Australasia, Central America and the Middle East.

With widening waistlines went higher risks for osteoarthritis, back pain, hypertension, diabtetes, stroke, coronary heart disease, sleep apnoea and cancer. Clinically obese people were likely to lose nine years from their lifespan; severely obese people could lose much more.

"Many nations now record 20% of their population as clinically obese and well over half the population is overweight," Prof Prentice told the science festival.

"These remarkable changes in the shape and anatomical composition of mankind represent a 'grade shift' in our evolution caused by a sudden change in the external environment in which we now live. The last such shift in our shape occurred about two centuries ago in Europe and involved an increase in average height by 30cm or more," he said. "However, the recent increase in girth is associated with a host of very damaging health outcomes which may undermine much of the progress that has been made in the last century in terms of health and longevity."

· Five new strains of simian immune deficiency virus have been found in Cameroon bush meat - primates killed for protein - Richard Wise of City hospital, Birmingham, told the festival.

"Nobody knows where HIV came from, and it is thought that it was possibly some mutated virus from west central Africa. The fact that some new, related viruses have now been found in the Cameroons just raises a concern, no more. The point is that people are going into areas about which we know very little of the viral ecology." Two forms of malaria were moving north into Europe with global warming. The number of rats in the UK - and the risk of leptospirosis - was predicted to increase. Increasing global travel meant greater risk of exotic infections. Antibiotic resistant microbes now claimed 5,000 lives in Britain each year and cost the health service around £1bn a year, he said. "We are living in a rapidly changing world where microbes vastly outnumber humans and are capable of adapting far more rapidly to changing situations than is mankind."

· Green bananas and aspirin could play a role in reducing hereditary bowel cancer in high risk patients, John Burn of Newcastle University told the festival. He and colleagues were trying to assemble a sample of 1,000 high risk people who could be treated with indigestible starch or aspirin to see if these prevented cancer. Without intervention, 80% of these would be likely to develop the disease. "The diagnosis of cancer is a terrible burden, but the discovery that a young person has developed cancer due to an inherited faulty gene has an even greater impact," said Prof Burn.