The 12 week study of 2,598 Canadian workers will be published in the July/August 2005 edition of the American Journal of Health Promotion.

People receiving the e-mails showed an increase in physical activity levels and also had more confidence in being able to participate in physical activity at the study's end. They also recognized more pros and fewer cons to physical actiivty and were more open to making dietary changes.

Further, those receiving e-mails actually reduced their mean body mass index (BMI), a measure of body fat based on height and weight, over the course of the study. By contrast, the mean BMI of the control group (people who did not receive the e-mails) slightly increased during the study period.

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Only a small proportion of plants have been subjected to serious phytochemical analysis, said Dr Mellon. Until now none of the new metabolites we found in this study had ever been identified from any of the species we examined, and only one had ever been described from another plant source. Modern profiling techniques should enable major breakthroughs to be made in understanding how genes interact with environment to determine the complex position of a plant or animal in life.

The scientists have yet to determine the stability of compounds during cooking and to conduct detailed dose-response studies to determine their impact on health.

The findings were published yesterday in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry and are available online through the journal ™s ASAP advance access: pubs.acs/cgi-bin/asap.cgi/jafcau/asap/pdf/jf050298i.pdf

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