needy people was plagued by a shortage -- of needy people.

"I sat down this morning and cried,'' said Carol Saunders, a volunteer who tried to round up poor families to enjoy the programme planned at the Red Robin Grill.

The dinner's organisers were left with food for 200, unopened gifts of toys for children and the unhappy task of figuring out what went wrong.

The restaurant employees were looking for a way to help the poor last fall when assistant kitchen manager Lerro suggested feeding local orphans on Christmas, have Santa show up and give the kids toys.

Lerro started looking for orphans -- without any luck. There are no orphanages in this generally prosperous area near Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, food came pouring in -- milk, ice cream and dinner rolls.

Saunders found that many poor families had plans to eat at a local soup kitchen. Others had no way of getting to the restaurant.

The gifts and food are being given to local charities.

Lerro and Saunders said that next year, they plan to start organising the dinner earlier.

Up to 1.4 million households in Britain stopped buying beef in the run-up to Christmas, apparently because of fears of contracting so-called "mad cow'' disease.

Market research firm Nielsen said beef-buying had declined steadily since the beginning of November and by the week ending December 16 sales were down by more than a quarter compared to the same period last year. Beefburger sales were down more than 40 percent.

Britons have been wary of beef since an outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), popularly known as mad cow disease, in cattle herds in the mid 1980s.

Fears that the disease could jump the barrier between cattle and humans and cause a similar fatal brain disease in people were exacerbated last month when several leading scientists said they had stopped eating burgers and pies.

The government insists that beef is safe to eat and has tightened slaughterhouse and export controls as a precaution but hundreds of British schools, under pressure from concerned parents, have stopped serving beef.

"Early indications suggest that with an increasing amount of schools refusing to serve beef, parents have taken the threat of BSE very seriously and have cut home spending on beefburgers,'' said a Nielsen spokesman.

"The possible implications of this for fast-food vendors cannot be ignored.'' Unfit middle-aged men seeking to cut their risk of heart disease should concentrate on diet, not just exercise, say researchers.

A University of Maryland study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that both weight loss and aerobic exercise do the older, fatter body good, but researchers found "aerobic exercise training in the absence of weight loss has substantially less beneficial effects.'' In the study of 111 sedentary and obese men aged 46 to 80, 44 were told to lose 10 percent of their body weight, while 49 were told to increase maximum aerobic capacity by 10 percent while maintaining body weight. The other 18 were a control.

Based on medical tests conducted before and after the nine-month regimen, men in both groups achieved reduced blood levels of low density lipoprotein cholesterol, the so-called bad cholesterol that contributes to artery blockage that leads to heart attacks and strokes.

Both also showed lower levels of plasma triglycerides and insulin, which are indicators of coronary artery disease.

But the weight-loss group gained even more health benefits, including significant increases in high-density "good'' cholesterol, larger decreases in fasting glucose and insulin levels and significantly lower blood pressure.

Age was a factor as well, as older subjects lost only two-thirds as much weight as middle-aged subjects and did not attain the same health benefits.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in most developed countries.