But in this week's Scrubbing Up, Professor Richard Ashcroft, a bio-ethics expert at Queen Mary, University of London, warns that will-power is often too weak.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley told the doctors' union, the British Medical Association, it was time for people to take more responsibility for the health of themselves and their families.

Lansley argued that if we want to see people eating healthier diets, smoking less, and taking more exercise, then an approach based on lecturing people, supervising what they eat, and banning things would fail - unless people's behaviours changed too.

He was not saying - as conservatives (small c) often do - that it is none of the state's business what people eat.

Quite the opposite: he was explicitly arguing for the state having a role in changing how people behave.

What Mr Lansley was doing was arguing that we need to look at the ways we try to encourage healthy eating, giving up smoking, etc.

Do they work? Or do they sometimes achieve the opposite of what we intended?

But politicians who advocate patients taking greater control of their own healthcare fail to understand what really motivates people.

It's all very noble, but recent behavioural science research challenges the idea that people are rational decision-makers where their personal health is concerned. People are not always in full control of their behaviour.

A prime example is smokers. Despite knowing the damage their vice causes, the instant fix they get from a cigarette overrides any consideration for long-term wellbeing.

The problem is not really that we all have things we like, and knowingly eat or drink, which aren't all that good for us.

A little of what you fancy

Most of us know that a little of what you fancy does you good, and most of the time we're right.

Sometimes we'll knowingly "trade off" different goals we have: I want that ice cream, and I want lose weight, and right now I choose the icecream, knowing that the plan to lose weight is taking a hit. But that's a conscious choice, even if I regret it later.

The problem is that often we make these sorts of choices unconsciously, or make mistakes. Or our commitment to our goals is weaker than we think. Or - hardest of all - our will is weak.

In other words, it isn't just that I trade off icecream against weight loss in favour of icecream now. It's that I do so systematically.

My behaviour is shaped by forces I don't know about, don't understand, and even when I do, I find hard to resist or control.

A lot of this is about getting better informed, but health education is only part of the story.

Some health information campaigns are very compelling - think of the anti-smoking campaigns which use children talking about their parents' lung cancers. But the evidence that they work is weak.

And they rarely have the seductive appeal of the campaigns of the tobacco and alcohol industries. Health campaigns are rarely about pleasure and enjoyment, and they are rarely cool.

But even when I get 'clean' information that isn't intended to bias my choices one way or another - my habits and thought processes are just as important, if not more important, than what I know.

Lecturing people fails both because no one likes to be hectored, and because people don't necessarily learn from it. And they have other sources of information as well.

Usually what drives me is circumstance, habit and short term reward. So the trick is to find ways to rewire my habits, change my circumstances, and make the rewards pull me in ways I want to go, and not in ways that are harmful to me. And that's hard.

It is also hard to see how getting industries which have an interest in getting me to buy their (harmful) products in increasing quantities can be trusted with promoting health education and health behaviour change at the same time.

With government advertising budgets being slashed and the Change4Life scheme being handed over to the private sector, this is a serious concern to many working for public health.

The sting in the tail of Mr Lansley's tale is that "personal responsibility" might be what's at the root of the problem, not the solution.

Taking a statin pill every day would offset the harm caused by a daily cheeseburger and milkshake, the Imperial College London team said.

It would only cost 5p a customer - similar to a sachet of ketchup.

But the British Heart Foundation warned an unhealthy diet does more harm than just raising cholesterol.

Writing in the American Journal of Cardiology, Dr Darrel Francis and colleagues said it was about reducing harm in the same way that people who smoke are encouraged to use filters and those who drive are told to wear seatbeltsA junk food diet has a wealth of unhealthy consequences beyond raising cholesterol”

They took data from trials of almost 43,000 people to calculate whether the statins could override the effects of eating a junk food diet.

A statin a day can neutralise the risk of cardiovascular disease linked to a daily intake of a 7-oz cheeseburger and a small milkshake, they calculated.

The researchers said there could be no substitute for leading a healthy lifestyle, including eating a good diet, but that a complimentary statin would be at least one positive choice among a sea of negative ones.

For those only eating junk food once a year, an annual one-off statin dose would have little effect, but for those who partake more regularly it would have a greater opportunity to neutralise that risk, they added.

Statins are already taken by millions of Britons to reduce the risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke by lowering levels of bad cholesterol in the blood.

They are thought to be fairly safe, although some experts have raised concerns about side-effects.

One low-dose statin - simvastatin - is available in a low dose to buy from the pharmacist.

"Importantly, even partial adherence to statin therapy conveys a mortality benefit, suggesting that statins do not need to be taken daily to have some protective effect," said Dr Francis.

Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning company.

Farmers say it is being done because it is only possible to tell that the animal's meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass.

US scientists are using a variety of techniques to assess which animals have exceptional qualities.

These attributes include meat quality, productivity or longevity.

These exceptional animals are cloned to be used as breeding stock, with the aim of raising the quality of herds on beef, dairy and pig farms in the US.

There is a long tradition of resurrecting dead animals for cloning - Dolly the sheep being a case in point.

The head of the leading US animal cloning company has said that European farmers will fall behind the rest of the world unless they are allowed to use such techniques to improve the productivity of their livestock.

The aim of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef.

But some cattle farmers believe it is impossible to pick the best quality animals until their meat has been properly analysed.

That is why there are cloned bulls here that have been produced from the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals.

Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully.

"The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter," he told BBC News.

"We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it's too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal."

These "resurrected" animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring - whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US - have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken.

Ranchers at the Simplot company also clone from live animals that are particularly productive or fertile.

The driving force behind the project is the head of the company, Scott Simplot, who firmly believes that cloning can be used to improve beef production. His stated aim is to raise the standard of the great American steak.

"The notion behind what we are doing is to find that animal that created that great steak - and once we have it, we want to reproduce it," he said.

"So (if we are successful), every time we have a steak at a restaurant it will have that memorable taste."

But the idea is not to everyone's taste. The leading whole food chain in the US, Whole Foods Market, has banned the sale of products of cloning.

According to its global vice-president, Margaret Wittenberg, although meat and milk from cloned animals has been allowed to go on sale in the US, most Americans have never heard of it.

"A lot of customers in the United States are oblivious of it," she said.

"You don't hear about it in the media. And when you do tell people about it they look at you and say 'you're kidding! They're not doing that are they? Why would they?'"

Ban bid

Mark Walton, president of the leading US animal cloning company, ViaGen, says livestock farmers have a very good reason to use his services.

He says scientists in many countries are trying to find ways of using the technology to boost production and quality.

Cloning is not used by livestock farmers in Europe, and there are moves by some members of the European Parliament to ban it altogether. Mr Walton believes that would be a mistake.

"If I were a European farmer and my competitors in the US, China and South America were using the technology, I'd be concerned about losing all access to it," he said.

It is early days for cloning in US agriculture. There are only a thousand clones in the one hundred million-strong American cattle herd.

The idea is to pick the best animals and use them to breed from. ViaGen charges cattle farmers $17,000 to clone an animal.

They say bacteria that make an enzyme called NDM-1 have travelled back with NHS patients who went abroad to countries like India and Pakistan for treatments such as cosmetic surgery.

Although there have only been about 50 cases identified in the UK so far, scientists fear it will go global.

Tight surveillance and new drugs are needed says Lancet Infectious Diseases.

NDM-1 can exist inside different bacteria, like E.coli, and it makes them resistant to one of the most powerful groups of antibiotics - carbapenems.

These are generally reserved for use in emergencies and to combat hard-to-treat infections caused by other multi-resistant bacteria.

And experts fear NDM-1 could now jump to other strains of bacteria that are already resistant to many other antibiotics.

Ultimately, this could produce dangerous infections that would spread rapidly from person to person and be almost impossible to treat.

At least one of the NDM-1 infections the researchers analysed was resistant to all known antibiotics.

Similar infections have been seen in the US, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands and international researchers say that NDM-1 could become a major global health problem.

Infections have already been passed from patient to patient in UK hospitals.

The way to stop NDM-1, say researchers, is to rapidly identify and isolate any hospital patients who are infected.

Normal infection control measures, such as disinfecting hospital equipment and doctors and nurses washing their hands with antibacterial soap, can stop the spread.

And currently, most of the bacteria carrying NDM-1 have been treatable using a combination of different antibiotics.

But the potential of NDM-1 to become endemic worldwide is "clear and frightening", say the researchers in The Lancet infectious diseases paper.

The research was carried out by experts at Cardiff University, the Health Protection Agency and international colleagues.

Dr David Livermore, one of the researchers and who works for the UK's Health Protection Agency (HPA), said: "There have been a number of small clusters within the UK, but far and away the greater number of cases appear to be associated with travel and hospital treatment in the Indian subcontinent.

"This type of resistance has become quite widespread there.

"The fear would be that it gets into a strain of bacteria that is very good at being transmitted between patients."

He said the threat was a serious global public health problem as there are few suitable new antibiotics in development and none that are effective against NDM-1.

The Department of Health has already put out an alert on the issue, he said.

"We issue these alerts very sparingly when we see new and disturbing resistance."

The National Resistance Alert came in 2009 after the HPA noted an increasing number of cases - some fatal - emerging in the UK.

The Lancet study looked back at some of the NDM-1 cases referred to the HPA up to 2009 from hospitals scattered across the UK.

At least 17 of the 37 patients they studied had a history of travelling to India or Pakistan within the past year, and 14 of them had been admitted to a hospital in these countries - many for cosmetic surgery.

For some of the patients the infection was mild, while others were seriously ill, and some with blood poisoning.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: "We are working with the HPA on this issue.

"Hospitals need to ensure they continue to provide good infection control to prevent any spread, consider whether patients have recently been treated abroad and send samples to HPA for testing.

"So far there has only been a small number of cases in UK hospital patients. The HPA is continuing to monitor the situation and we are investigating ways of encouraging the development of new antibiotics with our European colleagues."

The Welsh Assembly Government said it would be "fully considering" the report.

"The NHS in Wales is used to dealing with multi-resistant bacteria using standard microbiological approaches, and would deal with any new bacteria in a similar way," said a spokesperson.

The brain appears to be a vastly interconnected network much like the Internet, according to new research.

That runs counter to the 19th-Century "top-down" view of brain structure.

A novel technique to track signals across tiny brain regions has revealed connections between regions associated with stress, depression and appetite.

The research, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may lead to a full map of the nervous system.

Larry Swanson and Richard Thompson from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, US, isolated a small section of a rat's brain in the nucleus accumbens - a brain region long associated with pleasure and reward.

Their technique hinges on the injection of "tracers" at precise points in the brain tissue. These are molecules that do not interfere with the movement of signals across the tissue, but can be illuminated and identified using a microscope.

Loops not lines

What is new is that the researchers injected two tracers at the same point at the same time: one that showed where signals were going, and one that showed where they were coming from. The approach can show up to four levels of connection.

If the brain has a hierarchichal structure like a large company, as neurology has long held, the "to" and "from" diagram would show straight lines from independent regions up towards a central processing unit: the company's boss.

But instead, the researchers saw loops between differing regions, feeding back to and directly linking regions that were not known to communicate with one another. This is a better fit with the model of vast networks such as the internet.

The region of the brain studied by the researchers displays a network connecting regions associated with stress, appetite and depression.

Such a highly interconnected structure has been hypothesised for some time, and could prove to be a powerful tool in analysing how the brain processes information. But it had not, until now, been demonstrated experimentally.

"You would be amazed at how much of the current experimental neuroscience literature is dominated by 'top down-bottom up thinking', which goes back to the 19th Century, especially in neurology," Professor Swanson told BBC News.

"The bottom line is that no matter what you might think, the circuitry we've shown - that specific set of structural connections - has not been demonstrated before."

The work illuminates just one tiny corner of the vast number of connections present even in a small mammal's brain. But by slightly overlapping one mapped region with another, and mapping that, a far greater picture could emerge.

"This method is repeatable in a sensible way so that neural networks can be followed as far as they go - ultimately to the whole wiring diagram of the brain," Professor Swanson said.

Such a diagram would be boundlessly complex, and the degree to which it could shed light on the more slippery questions of consciousness and cognition is still up for debate.

"We have no idea right now, but the direct analogy is with the Human Genome Project: taking on faith that knowing the complete sequence of human DNA would be a foundation stone for biology, no matter how long the understanding may take to realise in practical terms."

This is true regardless of their body mass index (BMI), research published in Archives of Internal Medicine suggests.

But very high waist measurements equivalent to UK size 24-26 in women and XXXXL in men appear to double the risk of mortality.

For the study researchers tracked more than 100,000 men and women aged 50 and older over nine years.

They also found that in women the link between a larger waist and a higher risk of death was strongest for those of normal weight.

More research is needed to find out why this is so, say the authors of the study.

Dr Eric Jacobs and his team at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta examined the link between waist circumference and risk of death among 48,500 men and 56,343 women.

Participants were predominantly white. At the start of the study, the average age of the men was 69 years and of the women, 67 years.

From 1997 until 2006 the deaths of any participants were tracked and the causes noted.

A total of 9,315 men and 5,332 women died during this time.

Whether participants were of normal weight, overweight or obese, researchers found that risk of death increased with increasing waist circumference.

This risk significantly increased in men with waists measuring 110cm or more and in women with waists measuring 95cm or more, the study found.

But it is only in men and women with very large waists (120cm or larger in men and 110cm in women) that the risk of death appears to double during the nine-year study.

The most common cause of death in those with the strongest link between mortality and waist size was respiratory disease, followed by cardiovascular disease and then cancer.

The study concludes: "Our results suggest that, regardless of weight, avoiding gains in waist circumference may reduce risk of premature mortality."

Dr David Haslam, chair of the National Obesity Forum, said the research is important.

"This underlines the message that fat inside the belly is dangerous.

"Even if you have a normal BMI and a big tummy then you are just as much at risk as someone who is classified as obese with a large tummy."

Previous studies have shown that abdominal obesity is a strong indicator for the development of coronary artery disease and is associated with insulin resistance and the development of Type 2 diabetes.

The risk is associated with the fat stores, which are not just under the skin but deep within the abdominal cavity.

The heroin substitute methadone can be used as a way of weaning addicts off heroin but the substitute can also become addictive.

Earlier this year a debate broke out in Scotland when Professor Neil McKeganey, director of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research at the University of Glasgow, said more effort was needed to get people off drugs, including methadone, through abstinence.

But a group of 40 specialists, including university professors and doctors who treat addicts, responded: "If policy makers were to heed the critics' advice to close down methadone treatment or impose an arbitrary time limit on its administration, the community can anticipate more overdose deaths, more HIV and more crime."

So what do recovering addicts think? Chris used methadone for five years to help wean him off heroin but felt he had to quit the drug substitute last October

"I just thought, I've got to get a grip here, because I've been in and out of prison since I was 16 - that's half my life," he told The Report.

'Wake-up call'

Chris, an inmate of HMP Edinburgh, lives in Ratho Hall, a specialist Addiction Support Area that helps prisoners achieve abstinence.

"I heard about Ratho Hall, and it's given me the wake-up call that I needed," he said.

Chris was prescribed methadone, a synthetic opiate that is taken orally, to wean him off his heroin addiction but although methadone can help addicts stabilise their lives, it is also addictive.

Ratho Hall is the only facility of its kind in Scotland. It opened last year in brand new accommodation.

Of the 30 inmates resident last week, 11 have become completely drug-free.

'Quitting methadone'

The Scottish government produced its strategy document on drugs, The Road to Recovery, in 2008.

In this, the Community Safety Minister, Fergus Ewing of the SNP, explained how he wants to see "a new vision" for Scotland "where all drug treatment and rehabilitation services are based on the principle of recovery."

This is a shift away from an acceptance that people will stay on methadone for lengthy periods of time unchallenged.

Chris, who started to use heroin when he was 18, talked of his own addiction: "When you're on heroin or methadone your head's hazy. I realised when I was on methadone that I was just putting my life on hold.

"Now I feel that abstinence is a walk in the park compared to taking drugs. When you're abstinent you can just be yourself - it's a weight off your shoulders."

Chris said he could not have done it on his own. In Ratho Hall, there are drug counsellors, regular peer-support meetings and medical staff.

Paul Davidson, unit manager of Ratho Hall, explained how the unit works.

"If guys come in here on a methadone prescription, they have to have a reduction plan.

"So they'll be reduced at a rate they feel comfortable with and the doctor feels is right for them."

Around one in five prisoners in Scotland is being prescribed methadone.

But across the whole of Scotland it is estimated that 22,000 people are taking methadone.

Some of them may have been on it for decades. In England more than 150,000 people are receiving a substitute drug treatment for their addiction, normally methadone.

Maxie Richards, a committed Christian has been helping addicts get clean since 1986, and is a firm believer in abstinence.

Her suburban Glasgow home is an unlikely venue for drug rehabilitation.

"The majority of those I see now want to come off methadone. And it's harder to come off than heroin, it's so sad.

"It's also a very debilitating drug too, and can lead to memory loss," she explained.

James Boyd, one of the addicts who came to Maxie Richards for help, looks fit and well, but when he arrived on her doorstep in June, he was three stone lighter.

"I thought death would be better than the way I was feeling. What methadone does to you is wrecks you physically, mentally and spiritually.

"I said to myself, I can't do this any more. Every single person I know is on heroin and they are all on methadone too."

James stopped methadone and all other drugs nearly two months ago. He thinks he has got over the withdrawal symptoms now.

"It's just two weeks ago that I had my first full night's sleep."

Another former addict - Gail - is looking forward to a drug-free life.

She is slowly reducing her methadone dose with the support of her doctor. Gail has been taking methadone for eight years.

'Staying clean'

"A lot of addicts use methadone as a backup plan - so when you can't get hold of any drugs, you've got something to hold you.

"I was taking heroin on top of my methadone. Then I took half of it and used to sell the rest, which I know is wrong."

Eighteen months ago, Gail started to take methadone as it was prescribed.

"When I stopped injecting and started to take my full prescription, that's when I started to feel the benefit of methadone.

"I could get up in the morning, do the housework, and attend the appointments I'd made.

For the first time in many years, Gail is planning for her future with the help of the charity Centrepoint in Edinburgh.

She wants to go into a drug rehabilitation centre to make sure she overcomes her addiction once and for all. Then she aims to find a job.

And it is her methadone prescription that is keeping her away from heroin.