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DOES Louisiana hot sauce, a principal ingredient in the spicy New Orleans cocktail sauce commonly served with raw shellfish, kill certain bacteria found in raw oysters? The answer is yes, at least in the laboratory, researchers said in a preliminary report at a national scientific meeting on microbes and antibiotics yesterday. Principal ingredients of the traditional New Orleans cocktail sauce were found to kill a rare but sometimes fatal bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus. Dr. Sanders said that he saw his first case of V. vulnificus infection 10 years ago and that his interest in studying the sauces arose from lectures...

Broccoli is good for you but there's a trick to make it work even harder. Adding mustard, horseradish or wasabi to your broccoli has been found to significantly boost its cancer-fighting ability in a new study published this week. The secret sidekick is an enzyme called myrosinase which is necessary to form sulforaphane, the vegetable's cancer-preventive component. When a food item containing the enzyme was eaten with broccoli, scientists at the University of Ilinois found that the combination revved up the production of sulforaphane in both foods. The study was published online in the British Journal of Nutrition Tuesday. To...