Salad labelled as "ready-to-eat" is more dangerous than beefburgers, one of Britain's top food experts has said, following a spate of Cryptosporidium infections linked to the product.

Certain types of bacteria found in the pre-cut salad bags can be almost impossible to kill, Professor Hugh Pennington said, unless the leaves are irradiated - a process the public would oppose.

His claim follows a Health Protection Agency investigation into an outbreak of salad-linked Cryptosporidium infections that affected around 300 people in England and Scotland in May.

In the analysis of the exposure to different salad vegetables a significant statistical association was found between infection and the consumption of pre-cut spinach.

When specific retailers were included in the analysis, the strongest association with infection was found to be with consumption of ready to eat pre-cut mixed salad leaves from a major supermarket chain.

"Together these findings suggest that one or more types of salad vegetables could have been contaminated," said the HPA.

Food deprivation in infancy may promote negative traits at age 40

Malnutrition in the first year life, even when followed by a good diet and restored physical health, predisposes people to a troubled personality at age 40, new research suggests.

The study of 77 formerly malnourished people represents the first evidence linking malnutrition shortly after birth to adult personality traits. The traits in some cases may foretell psychiatric problems, says a team led by psychiatrist Janina Galler of Harvard Medical School in Boston and psychologist Paul Costa of Duke University Medical Center in Durham.

Compared with peers who were well-fed throughout their lives, formerly malnourished men and women reported markedly more anxiety, vulnerability to stress, hostility, mistrust of others, anger and depression, Galler's team reports March 12 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Survivors of early malnutrition also cited relatively little intellectual curiosity, social warmth, cooperativeness and willingness to try new experiences and to work hard at achieving goals.

Veteran New York Times journalist Michael Moss entered the world of food reporting when he covered a salmonella outbreak in a Georgia peanut factory, a story he came to see as being about "loss of control by the food industry." He followed up on that theme with an investigation of E. coli-tainted Cargill hamburger, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Around that time, he says, a close source told him, "As bad as these contamination incidents are, there's this other public-health crisis out there that's caused by the stuff we intentionally put it into processed foods, and have absolute control over." Meaning, of course, salt, sugar, and fat - the "holy trinity" of processed-food ingredients, and the namesake of Moss' new book.

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us traces how these ingredients worked their way into our food in ever-larger amounts, not by accident but as part of a concerted effort by food companies to make their products as irresistible and addictive as possible. Moss profiles the food scientists whom corporations like Kellogg and Kraft pay to formulate exact combinations of ingredients that target consumers' "bliss point": where food is as tasty as possible without being so satisfying that we stop wanting more. Think junk food like Cheez-Its, movie-theater popcorn, and Oreos: You can kill a whole bag of the stuff without even noticing.

The United States is one of only two countries, the other being New Zealand, that allows drugs to be advertised on TV, and it's not difficult to understand why nearly every other country has given such ads the boot.

As with all commercials, the ads are intended to influence you to buy their products. In the case of prescription medications, the "product" is a potentially dangerous chemical drug that is loaded with side effects.

In a 2009 Harris Poll, 51 percent said that drug ads encourage them to ask questions when they go to their doctor, and a whopping 44 percent actually believe drug ads make them more knowledgeable about treatments for their ailments.

Now, a new study assessing the effect of direct-to-consumer drug advertising has concluded that TV ads for statins may be a driving factor of overdiagnosis of high cholesterol and overtreatment with the drugs.¹

The reason is clear. People who dutifully ask their doctors about a drug advertised on TV usually end up receiving a prescription...

Is it any wonder then that one in four Americans over the age of 45 is now taking a statin drug, despite the fact that there are over 900 studies proving their adverse effects, which run the gamut from muscle problems to diabetes and increased cancer risk.

Odds are likely greater than 100 to 1 that if you're taking a statin, you don't really need it. The ONLY subgroup that might benefit are those born with a genetic defect called familial hypercholesterolemia, as this makes them resistant to traditional measures of normalizing cholesterol.

This week we revisit the topic of psychopaths but from the angle of the women who have fallen "in love" with them and suffered the consequences.

Our guest will be Sandra L. Brown. Sandra holds a master's degree in counseling with a former specialization in personality disorders/pathology. She is a program development specialist, lecturer, community educator, and award-winning author.

Sandra is also a writer for Psychology Today and has been interviewed in magazines such as Seventeen. She has appeared in more than 50 television shows including Anderson Cooper's daytime show, "Anderson". She has provided consultation to film producers regarding pathological love relationship dynamics based on her books.

Sandra's books include the award-winning Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of inevitable Harm With Psychopaths, Sociopaths & Narcissists and How to Spot a Dangerous Man Before You Get Involved

Running Time: 02:05:00

Download: MP3

Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories -- A man from Canada's Northwest Territories said he had a 3-inch knife blade embedded in his back for three years without doctors noticing.

Billy McNeely, 32, of Fort Good Hope, said he repeatedly complained about pain in his back following a stabbing, but doctors never took X-rays and told him the pain was from nerve damage, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported Wednesday.

"I've done some jail time in the past. The guards rub over you with a metal wand detector, and every time it hit my back in the jail it went off," he said.

McNeely said a lump formed in the painful spot on his back and earlier this week he touched it and felt something odd.

Every day it seems like some new discovery is revealed about the microbial life on our bodies, in our bodies and around our homes. The tendency in writing about such studies is to make sweeping conclusions about what is and is not and, of course, how we should live and what we should do. But the truth is that these new studies are part of a big lunge science is making into a great darkness. The lights we are shining are revealing treasures and discoveries, but no one has a lens big enough to see the whole picture, not yet anyway. The temptation is to stand at the site of each new discovery and try to make the prediction about what is next. I'm going to do something else here. I'm going to try to predict not the next discovery but instead the next ten years.

You can check back in ten years to tell me whether I was full of it. I probably am, but what fun is a blog if you can't speculate a bit. For what it is worth, these wild ideas come largely from extrapolating what we know about ecology of non-human species in general and applying it to humans and the microbes around us. In other words, if humans obey the ecological regularities the last fifty years of ecology have revealed then it will be discovered that...

Sleep plays an important role in the brain's ability to consolidate learning when two new potentially competing tasks are learned in the same day, research at the University of Chicago demonstrates.

Other studies have shown that sleep consolidates learning for a new task. The new study, which measured starlings' ability to recognize new songs, shows that learning a second task can undermine the performance of a previously learned task. But this study is the first to show that a good night's sleep helps the brain retain both new memories.

Starlings provide an excellent model for studying memory because of fundamental biological similarities between avian and mammalian brains, scholars wrote in the paper, "Sleep Consolidation of Interfering Auditory Memories in Starlings," published in the current online edition ofPsychological Science.

"These observations demonstrate that sleep consolidation enhances retention of interfering experiences, facilitating daytime learning and the subsequent formation of stable memories," the authors wrote.

The paper was written by Timothy Brawn, a graduate researcher in psychology at UChicago; Howard Nusbaum, professor of psychology; and Daniel Margoliash, professor of psychology, organismal biology and anatomy. Nusbaum is a leading expert on learning, and Margoliash is a pioneer in the research of brain function and its development in birds.

For the study, the researchers conducted two experiments using 24 starlings each. They played two recorded songs from other starlings and tested the birds' ability to recognize and repeat the two songs. After learning to recognize the two songs, the birds were later trained to recognize and perform a different pair of songs.

Time to go back to Eby and Eby. I have an inexplicable fondness for this paper. The information is decent if a touch unorganized, and the reliance on case studies reminds me (in a pleasing way) of old fashioned papers, such as this one by John Cade about the use of lithium in mania.

When you start to untangle the effects of magnesium in the nervous system, you touch upon nearly every single biological mechanism for depression I've described so far in the archives of my blog. The epidemiological studies (1) and some controlled trials (2)(3) give us good reason to suspect that most of us are at least moderately deficient in magnesium. The animal models are promising (4). If you have healthy kidneys, magnesium supplementation is safe and generally well-tolerated (up to a point)(5), and many of the formulations are quite inexpensive. Yet there is a woeful lack of well-designed, decent-sized randomized controlled trials of various psychiatric disorders and magnesium supplementation.

Let's look at the mechanisms first. Magnesium hangs out in the synapse between two neurons along with calcium and glutamate. If you recall, calcium and glutamate are excitatory, and in excess, toxic. They activate the NMDA receptor. Magnesium can sit on the NMDA receptor without activating it, like a guard at the gate. Therefore, if we are deficient in magnesium, there's no guard. Calcium and glutamate can activate the receptor like there is no tomorrow. In the long term, this damages the neurons, eventually leading to cell death. In the brain, that is not an easy situation to reverse or remedy.

And then there is the stress-diathesis model of depression. The idea that chronic stress leads to hormonal imbalances of excess cortisol, which eventually damages the hippocampus of the brain, leading to impaired negative feedback and thus ongoing stress and depression and neurotoxicity badness. Murck shows that magnesium seems to act on many levels in the hormonal axis and regulation of the stress response. Magnesium can suppress the ability of the hippocampus to stimulate the ultimate release of stress hormone, it can reduce the release of ACTH (the hormone that tells your adrenal glands to get in gear and pump out that cortisol and adrenaline), and it can reduce the responsiveness of the adrenal glands to ACTH. In addition, magnesium can act at the blood brain barrier to prevent the entrance of stress hormones into the brain. Magnesium is the original chill pill.