Poached cod and potatoes with lemon butter, sautéed haricot verts, and fresh avocado -- sound like a meal from Heartland or Spoonriver? Well, that's what I had for lunch recently at College Simin de Palay, a junior high school in the town of Lescar, France. And as good as the meal sounds, the story behind it is equally appealing.

But first, like a good meal, we need a little appetizer. In Minnesota and across the nation, health care and education reform are topics of high importance. And from the First Lady to five-star generals, more and more people are making the connection between what our students eat in school and how it affects health, well-being, and academic performance. On the heels of Simple, Good, and Tasty's, exposition on Minneapolis school lunch, I wanted to share my recent visit to Lescar, where I experienced first-hand how the school prepares meals for its students and learned directly about their approach to school lunch.

An expert speaking on an Australian TV news show reveals fluoride for what it is - a poison.

Most preschool children develop a taste for salt, sugar and fat at home, and quickly learn which types of brand-name fast foods and sodas meet these preferences, U.S. researchers say.

In one experiment, the mothers of 67 children, aged 3 to 5, were asked to list their youngsters' taste preferences and listed foods high in sugar, fat and salt. The researchers tested the children and found that the parents' answers were accurate.

In a second experiment, the researchers looked at the association between the taste preferences of 108 preschool children and their emerging awareness of brands of fast food and sugar-sweetened beverages.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff don't know what killed more than 83,000 fresh water drum fish on December 29.

They've tested the water for bacteria, viral infection, parasites, and toxins but they tests have eliminated each as a possibility. Consequently, UAPB researchers say that fish in the Arkansas River are safe to eat and that they have no concerns about eating fish.

Arkansas Game and Fish Commision Supervisor Bob Limbard said that fish kills are not that uncommon, "but kills of this magnitude in Arkansas are rare," he told the Arkansas News Bureau.

How maternal essential fatty acid deficiency impact on its progeny is poorly understood. Dietary insufficiency in omega-3 fatty acid has been implicated in many disorders. Researchers from Inserm and INRA and their collaborators in Spain collaboration, have studied mice fed on a diet low in omega-3 fatty acid. They discovered that reduced levels of omega-3 had deleterious consequences on synaptic functions and emotional behaviours. Details of this work are available in the online version of the journal Nature neuroscience, which can be accessed here.

In industrialized nations, diets have been impoverished in essential fatty acids since the beginning of the 20th century. The dietary ratio between omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid omega-3 increased continuously over the course of the 20th century. These fatty acids are "essential" lipids because the body cannot synthesize them from new. They must therefore be provided through food and their dietary balance is essential to maintain optimal brain functions.

Olivier Manzoni (Head of Research Inserm Unit 862, "Neurocentre Magendie", in Bordeaux and Unit 901 "Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée" in Marseille), and Sophie Layé (Head of Research at INRA Unit 1286, "Nutrition et Neurobiologie Intégrative" in Bordeaux) and their co-workers hypothesized that chronic malnutrition during intra-uterine development, may later influence synaptic activity involved in emotional behaviour (e.g. depression, anxiety) in adulthood.

Children who sleep less than their peers may be at greater risk for abnormal blood glucose levels and other metabolic problems.

Researchers studied the sleep patterns of 308 children ages 4 to 10, half of them overweight or obese. They used wrist monitors to measure their sleep time over seven days, and did blood tests for cardiovascular risk indicators like glucose, lipids, insulin and C-reactive protein.

The study, published in the February issue of Pediatrics, found that obesity and abnormal blood tests were four times as common in children who slept the least, and three times as common in those who used the weekend to catch up on sleep lost during school days.

"We can't rule out that obese children first became obese and then started sleeping less," said Dr. David Gozal, the senior author. "But it's unlikely."

Among all children, obese or not, shorter sleep and greater variability in sleep patterns were more likely to be associated with abnormal blood tests. The researchers conclude that irregular sleep by itself may be a risk factor for metabolic problems.

As a new survey reveals two-thirds of us can't get a good night's sleep, we examine research on new drugs which could tackle insomnia by changing our body clocks

My first serious sleep problem was triggered by looming redundancy. Faced with the prospect of losing my job, worries over money just before Christmas and anxiety about the future, I lay awake for hours, my thoughts racing, or wandered around a freezing house, munching bowls of cereal.

I'd finally drop off about five, only to have to get up at seven. This led, in turn, to days spent in a haze of nervous exhaustion and fatigue, just at a time when I needed all my energy to stay positive about the future rather than sinking into a pit of misery.

Sleeping pills made life more tolerable at first, but turned out to add to my troubles in the long term. Advised by the GP to take the pills "as needed", it was easy to convince myself I couldn't get to sleep without them. Soon I was taking them every night and starting to panic that I'd become dependent. I finally stopped taking them on New Year's Eve - and, distressingly, found myself awake the whole night.

When you have hypothyroidism it's easy to get caught up in thyroid lab values and which thyroid meds and supplements work the best. While these are significant factors in improving thyroid health, it's important to remember gut health is foundational to thyroid health. As long as you struggle with a leaky gut, gut inflammation, gut infections or parasites, heartburn, poor digestion, or chronic constipation or diarrhea - conditions that are so popular they fuel a multi-billion-dollar industry of drugstore remedies - you'll never experience optimum thyroid health.

As I mention in the introduction to my book, poor thyroid function is like the engine light in your car turning on - it's an indication to open the hood, investigate the engine, and repair what's wrong. You don't want to just take a drug or a supplement that will make the engine light go off.

The gut-thyroid connection can be a vicious circle as hypothyroidism causes poor digestive health, and poor digestive health may cause hypothyroidism. This is why it's so important to appropriately manage Hashimoto's and hypothyroidism, which involves more than finding the right thyroid medication. For the most part however, America's addiction to processed foods, sweets, and stressed-out lifestyles leaves most people in need of some serious gut repair.

How poor gut health impacts the thyroid

For 90 percent of Americans, hypothyroidism is caused by Hashimoto's, an autoimmune thyroid disease. Since most of the immune system is situated in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, poor gut health is a significant factor in triggering and exacerbating autoimmune diseases such as Hashimoto's. An important step in taming Hashimoto's is to repair gut health.

Conversely, appropriately managing Hashimoto's and restoring thyroid function can help improve digestive function. Studies show both T4 and T3 protect the intestinal lining from ulcers. Studies also show hypothyroidism can cause intestinal permeability, or "leaky gut," which allows undigested food into the bloodstream and instigates an immune attack. These are examples of the thyroid-gut vicious cycle and how you may need to go after both fronts at once.

Shaped by glacial temperatures, stark landscapes and protracted winters, the traditional Inuit diet had little in the way of plant food, no agricultural or dairy products, and was unusually low in carbohydrates. Most people subsisted on what they hunted and fished.

Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat from Northwestern Alaska describes her food culture:

Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking and as a dipping sauce for food. We had moose, caribou, and reindeer. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail called ptarmigan. We caught crab and lots of fish - salmon, whitefish, tomcod, pike, and char. Our fish were cooked, dried, smoked, or frozen. We ate frozen raw whitefish, sliced thin. The elders liked stinkfish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. And fermented seal flipper, they liked that too.

These foods hardly make up the "balanced" diet most of us grew up with, and they look nothing like the mix of grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy we're accustomed to seeing in conventional food pyramid diagrams. Yet how can people who gorge on fat and animal protein be healthier than we are?

Many experts are considering a redefinition of the personality disorder

Everyone knows a narcissist - either from life, politics, or fiction.

The friend who only thinks about herself. Political despots like Stalin or Mussolini. Fictional Mafia leaders Don Corleone and Tony Soprano, or characters like Gordon Gekko from the movie "Wall Street'' (representing a few real-world figures who work at that address).

Now, the group that defines mental illness in America is thinking about redefining narcissism.

Nothing's been decided yet, but there's a good chance that narcissistic personality disorder will cease to be a mental illness of its own and will instead be folded into other personality disorders, making it a trait of someone with a broader problem.

The labeling issue may seem arcane, but it matters to patients who want a name for their problem, to family members for whom a label can help them better understand their loved one, and to doctors who have to call it something in order to get reimbursed for treatment. It also matters to insurance companies, which generally require that a diagnosis fit a condition as officially defined by the American Psychiatric Association.

In a sense, narcissism has been done in by its own success.

Because so many narcissists are thriving - at the expense of the rest of us - it's hard to classify "narcissism'' as a disability. Growing up with a narcissistic parent or marrying one can be disabling, but, almost by definition, many narcissists go through life without realizing the harm they are doing to others.

A narcissist is someone who has an unrealistic sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy, and a "conviction of being different and special and entitled that is so profound that they feel it's only natural people will admire them and want to do whatever they want to do,'' said Dr. John M. Oldham, chief of staff at the Menninger Clinic, a psychiatric research and treatment center in Houston. "Corporate America is filled with people with a lot of this kind of problem.''