Food-safety lessons set to music tend to stick better

Stayin' Alive

"Who left the food out? (Woof, woof, woof, woof)"

If you don't like that Baha Men takeoff, see if this sounds familiar:

"Oh yeah, I'll tell you something

I think you'll understand

For the sake of sanitation

You'd better wash your hands."

It turns out that food-safety lessons set to music tend to stick better in the minds of food-service supervisors, culinary arts students and your average middle-school health class, according to an article in the Journal of Food Science Education. Youths who got the music-enriched lessons did significantly better when tested on the material, which could help reduce the nation's 76 million cases a year of food-borne illness, says lead research Carl Winter of the University of California at Davis.

Winter, who wrote the parodies, has something for every musical taste, from "Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters" to "We Are the Microbes." You'll find more at http://foodsafe.ucdavis.edu/html/audio/eat_it.html.

Just try not to get mixed up if your next class is chorus.

Don't blame binky

Conventional wisdom says that using pacifiers causes babies to stop breast-feeding earlier than other babies who don't use pacifiers.

But in this case, conventional wisdom appears to be wrong, say researchers writing in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Researchers reviewed 29 previous studies and said that while pacifier use and a shortened period of breast-feeding might sometimes go hand-in-hand, there's no evidence one causes the other. Rather, they might both be symptoms of difficulty breast-feeding or of a mother's intent to wean the baby.

Outsmarted

Looking for a reason to feel superior?

Americans over age 65 scored better on cognitive tests than British people the same age, earning 13.2 points vs. 11.7 out of 24 points on a word-recall exercise, researchers reported in the online journal BMC Geriatrics. Americans over age 85 left the British test subjects even further behind.

The researchers said the finding was especially surprising since the Americans had more heart disease and diabetes.

The American group also was somewhat wealthier, better educated, less likely to be depressed and more likely to be taking antihypertensive medication. That last clue warrants further study, researchers say, to determine whether aggressive management of cardiovascular disease could improve cognitive skills.