New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is on yet another health crusade — this time against salty soups. Hizzoner is spending $370,000 in city and federal funds on subway ads featuring salt spewing from a can of chicken and rice soup.

Here’s a story that you probably didn’t read in your morning newspaper: An international panel of experts meeting in Canada has rebuked the numerous bodies in recent years that have restricted the common plastic hardening chemical bisphenol A (BPA). The panel has concluded that the levels of BPA circulating in the human body “are very low, indicating that BPA is not accumulated in the body and is rapidly eliminated through urine.”

The panel went on to say:

While one-third of Americans suffer from full-blown high blood pressure, Laura Landro of The Wall Street Journal reports that an additional 37 percent of the U.S. population may have prehypertension — a classification devised in 2003 by medical experts that includes what was once considered to be “normal to high normal” levels (blood pressure between 120 and 139 mm Hg systolic and 80 to 89 mm Hg diastolic).

Halloween may already be over, but the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) hasn’t given up on scaring smokers quite yet. Describing it as “the most significant change in more than 25 years,” the HHS revealed yesterday new, larger, more graphic warning labels that will be required on cigarette packages and ads. The pictures will include images of a dead body in a morgue, a man having a heart attack, and a lung bisected with a surgical scar.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to the kinds of things your smart phone device can accomplish. It can tell you where the nearest Starbucks is, the fastest driving route from home to work, and now a forum called the UK Clinical Research Collaboration is developing technology that will allow your phone to even tell you whether or not you have a sexually transmitted infection (STI).

Most of us may already know that smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the U.S., killing an average of 440,000 people annually. But not all of us know that women who smoke or used to smoke regularly are at a greater risk of dying from breast cancer. Those statistics come from a large prospective cohort study conducted by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and presented at the Ninth Annual American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference.

A new meta-analysis of statin drug trials shows that the lower your “bad” cholesterol, the lower your risk of heart attack and stroke. Even those whose low-density lipoprotein (LDL, the “bad” cholesterol) levels are already on the low side stand to benefit by further reductions, the study showed.

Kansas State University nutrition professor Marc Haub’s infamous “Twinkie” diet challenges the notion of “junk” food — he lost twenty-seven pounds and lowered his BMI by four points in two months by eating Hostess, Little Debbie, and other convenience store snacks for meals.

In yesterday’s Dispatch, we discussed the introduction of a bill called Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now, which seeks to provide financial and other incentives for pharmaceutical companies to invest in the development of new antibiotics to combat drug-resistant bacteria (superbugs).

Against our best efforts, the newest BPA headline and its accompanying “study” managed to worm its way into today’s Dispatch, but only as an example of the utterly absurd. “Bisphenol A linked to sterility in roundworm,” Canada’s CBC News tells us. But the study wasn’t a complete waste of time and money — some of us got a good laugh out of it. “I only wonder how much federal money — that’s your tax money, by the way — went towards this study.