For something that's so often mixed with anti-caking agents, salt takes a lot of lumps in the American imagination. Like fat, people tend to think of it as an unnecessary additive - something to be avoided by seeking out processed foods that are "free" of it. But also like fat, salt is an essential component of the human diet - one that has been transformed into unhealthy forms by the food industry.

Historically, though, salt was prized. Its reputation can be found in phrases like, "Worth one's salt," meaning, "Worth one's pay," since people were often paid in salt and the word itself is derived from the Latin salarium, or salary.

Those days are long over. Doctors and dietitians, along with the USDA dietary guidelines, recommend eating a diet low in sodium to prevent high blood pressure, risk of cardiovascular disease, and stroke; and doctors have been putting their patients on low-salt diets since the 1970s. But a new study, published in the May 4 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that low-salt diets actually increase the risk of death from heart attack and stroke - and in fact don't prevent high blood pressure.

German experts Thursday identified Spanish cucumbers as the source of a virulent super-bacterium that has killed three people and left hundreds ill.

Hamburg's hygiene institute discovered the bacterium on three cucumbers from Spain, the city's Health Senator Cornelia Pruefer-Storcks said.

'It cannot be ruled out that other food produce is a possible source of infection,' Pruefer-Storcks said.

Several environmental and public health groups filed suit against the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday to try to force the government to stop farmers from routinely adding antibiotics to livestock feed to help animals grow faster.

The groups say widespread agricultural antibiotic use and the FDA's allowance of the practice are compounding a public health crisis: the increasing prevalence of "superbugs" that infect people and do not respond to antibiotics.


"The longer we use these drugs, the less effective the arsenal becomes," said Margaret Mellon, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which filed the complaint in federal court with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animals Concern Trust and Public Citizen.

After finding high concentrations of bacteria inside hailstones, researchers suggest there is mounting evidence that atmospheric microorganisms play a key role in how water molecules aggregate in hail, rain, snow and other weather events.

At the 111th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) in New Orleans this week, Alexander Michaud of Montana State University in Bozeman presented his team's latest findings in the new and growing field of "bioprecipitation", where researchers investigate the extent to which bacteria and other microorganisms influence weather events.

Some consumers are concerned that such foods may pose health risks and say manufacturers should be required to identify them for consumers.

When a team of activists wearing white hazmat suits showed up at a Chicago grocery store to protest the sale of genetically modified foods, they picked an unlikely target: Whole Foods Market.

Organic foods, by definition, can't knowingly contain genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs. But genetically modified corn, soy and other crops have become such common ingredients in processed foods that even one of the nation's top organic food retailers says it hasn't been able to avoid stocking some products that contain them.

"No one would guess that there are genetically engineered foods right here in Whole Foods," said Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Organic Consumers Association, which organized the protest. The activists dramatically trashed a battery of well-known health food brands outside the store, including Tofutti, Kashi and Boca Burgers.

Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious - obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth - is what makes it so alluring. But it's misleading and misconceived on so many levels that it's hard to imagine how it survived unscathed and virtually unchallenged for the last fifty years.

It has done incalculable harm. Not only is this thinking at least partly responsible for the ever-growing numbers of obese and overweight in the world - while directing attention away from the real reasons we get fat - but it has served to reinforce the perception that those who are fat have no one to blame but themselves. That eating less invariably fails as a cure for obesity is rarely perceived as the single most important reason to make us question our assumptions, as Hilde Bruch suggested half a century ago. Rather, it is taken as still more evidence that the overweight and obese are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation. And it puts the blame for their physical condition squarely on their behavior, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Gary Taubes from Why We Get Fat

Truth was an early victim in the battle against tobacco. The big lie, repeated ad nauseam in anti-tobacco circles, is that smoking causes more than 400,000 premature deaths each year in the United States. That mantra is the principal justification for all manner of tobacco regulations and legislation, not to mention lawsuits by dozens of states for Medicaid recovery, class actions by seventy-five to eighty union health funds, similar litigation by thirty-five Blue Cross plans, twenty-four class suits by smokers who are not yet ill, sixty class actions by allegedly ill smokers, five hundred suits for damages from secondhand smoke, and health-related litigation by twelve cities and counties - an explosion of adjudication never before experienced in this country or elsewhere.

The war on smoking started with a kernel of truth - that cigarettes are a high risk factor for lung cancer - but has grown into a monster of deceit and greed, eroding the credibility of government and subverting the rule of law. Junk science has replaced honest science and propaganda parades as fact. Our legislators and judges, in need of dispassionate analysis, are instead smothered by an avalanche of statistics - tendentious, inadequately documented, and unchecked by even rudimentary notions of objectivity. Meanwhile, Americans are indoctrinated by health "professionals" bent on imposing their lifestyle choices on the rest of us and brainwashed by politicians eager to tap the deep pockets of a pariah industry.

The aim of this paper is to dissect the granddaddy of all tobacco lies - that smoking causes 400,000 deaths each year. To set the stage, let's look at two of the many exaggerations, misstatements, and outright fabrications that have dominated the tobacco debate from the outset.

It was bedtime for Krista and Tatiana Hogan, and the 4-year-old twin girls were doing what 4-year-olds everywhere do at bedtime. They were stalling, angling for more time awake. Their grandmother, Louise McKay, who lives with the girls and their parents in Vernon, a small city in British Columbia, was speaking to them in soothing tones, but the girls resorted to sleep-deferring classics of the toddler repertory. "I want one more hug!" Krista said to their grandmother, and then a few minutes later, they both called out to her, in unison, "I miss you!"

But in the dim light of their room, a night light casting faint, glowing stars and a moon on the ceiling, the girls also showed bedtime behavior that seemed distinctly theirs. The twins, who sleep in one specially built, oversize crib, lay on their stomachs, their bottoms in the air, looking at an open picture book on the mattress. Slowly and silently, in one synchronized movement, they pushed it under a blanket, then pulled it out again, then back under, over and over, seeming to mesmerize each other with the rhythm.

Suddenly the girls sat up again, with renewed energy, and Krista reached for a cup with a straw in the corner of the crib. "I am drinking really, really, really, really fast," she announced and started to power-slurp her juice, her face screwed up with the effort. Tatiana was, as always, sitting beside her but not looking at her, and suddenly her eyes went wide. She put her hand right below her sternum, and then she uttered one small word that suggested a world of possibility: "Whoa!"

New research has weakened the perceived link between saturated fat and heart disease. Today, many experts agree that refined carbs pose a much greater danger.

Is it possible - even imaginable - that nearly everyone has been wrong about saturated fat and its connection to heart disease? Brace yourself. Based on a wave of new research, all the dietary admonitions about saturated fat could end up being little more than a huge mistake.

"The question is whether saturated fat is harmful or is just a bystander," says Ronald M. Krauss, MD, a lipid specialist and the director of atherosclerosis research at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute. "Saturated fat may have an effect on cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, but the effect is so small that we just can't detect it. We shouldn't be demonizing saturated fat."

Krauss can back up his opinion with hard science. He and his colleagues recently analyzed 21 published studies involving almost 350,000 people who were tracked from five to 23 years. Their conclusion: People who consumed the most saturated fat did not have a higher risk of heart disease, stroke or any other form of CVD. They published their findings last year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Drug-resistant bacteria - "superbugs" - are becoming a global crisis. But the government not only thwarts the development of new antibiotic drugs. It also willfully ignores powerful natural therapies and cures.

Last August, the UN's World Health Organization issued a global alert on the dangers of drug-resistant bacteria: "Some bacteria have developed mechanisms which render them resistant to many of the antibiotics normally used for their treatment, so pose particular difficulties, as there may be few or no alternative options for therapy." Germs resistant to one or more drugs kill 100,000 US hospital patients a year and cost the healthcare system more than $34 billion, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America. This could easily rise to the millions worldwide as major bacterial pandemics emerge.

And as we reported in February, the world is also facing wave after wave of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in our food - a consequence of farmers' overuse of antibiotics for their animals, and doctors' routine prescribing of antibiotics to treat sore throats and other non-bacterial illnesses.