Products branded “smooth”, “silver” or “gold” are generally believed to be healthier and easier to give up, a survey of 1,300 people found.

But when shown plain packs the false beliefs disappeared, University of Nottingham researchers discovered.

EU rules ban any claims that some cigarettes are safer than others.

Participants in the study were shown pairs of cigarette packs and asked to compare what they were like, or what they assumed they would be like, in terms of taste, tar levels, health risk, attractiveness, how easy they would be to give up and how attractive they would be to someone choosing to smoke for the first time.

The sausage and mashed potato combo came top in a poll commissioned by TV channel Good Food.

The survey asked more than 3,000 people about their eating habits now compared with last year and asked them to name their favourite dish.

Bangers and mash got 16% of the votes, beating fish and chips into second with 15%, while beans on toast came in third with 10%.

Richard Kingsbury, head of the Good Food channel, said: “It’s heartening to know that even if people can’t afford to go out they are still having fun with good food and the friends they’ve invited round.

“Food programmes have played a part in giving people the confidence and creativity to have a go at cooking for friends, whether it be bangers and mash or Thai green curry.”

A GROUP that claims vaccines cause autism, brain damage and cancer has been reported to the healthcare watchdog for allegedly spreading misinformation and endangering children’s health.

The official complaint to the Health Care Complaints Commission follows a newspaper advertisement paid for by businessman Dick Smith pleading with parents to ignore the Australian Vaccination Network’s fear campaign.

AVN is run by Meryl Dorey, who publishes a website and newsletter, campaigns against mass public immunisation programs and promotes the use of homeopathy to prevent disease.

The Australian Skeptics group supports the complaint that Ms Dorey and the network are breaching the Health Care Complaints Act by making unsubstantiated health claims based on “conspiracy theories”, pseudo-scientific evidence and debunked research.

Ms Dorey, of Bangalow on the Far North Coast, says her eldest son, now 20, was “vaccine-injured” from the diphtheria-tetanus-polio immunisation when he was two months old and the measles-mumps-rubella shot at 12 months.

She attributes his life-long sleep apnoea and allergies to the vaccinations. Ms Dorey said she was not anti-vaccination, just “pro-information and pro-choice”.

“We never have and never will tell anyone that they should not vaccinate. We simply fill the information void left by government and the mainstream medical community,” she said.

But Dick Smith, the Skeptics and the author of the complaint, Ken McLeod, say Ms Dorey and AVN do not promote choice because her speeches and publications never mention the proven benefits of immunisation, and the group’s motto is: “Love them, protect them, never inject them.”

“They can have their view but be upfront about it and don’t quote dubious scientific evidence that has been debunked,” Skeptics executive officer Tim Mendham said.

Mr Smith wrote and funded the advertisement because he believed young, vulnerable mothers were being conned by the network’s claim to be an independent voice.

Complaints commission executive officer Kim Swan said the allegations were being assessed, and AVN had been asked to respond.

Ms Dorey said the commission did not have jurisdiction over her or the network because she was not medically qualified and did not provide a health service.

Common, but not really correct anymore. These days — when the ramp-up to a restaurant’s opening is endless, the storm of bloggers dissecting its baby steps is boundless and its frenzied first months can make or break it — it often shows the most discipline and highest standards at the start. After that, there is drift, to different degrees, at different velocities. What the restaurant gains in maturity it loses in pure drive.

As for the elite club of truly extraordinary restaurants, they don’t so much raise the level of their games as maintain it (which is blessing and pleasure enough). Jean Georges and Per Se are magnificent now, but they were magnificent then, too. While there’s magic in a meal at either, there isn’t really any sense of revelation.

That’s why my visits to Eleven Madison Park over the last five years have, in arc and aggregate, given me such particular joy. I watched a distinguished restaurant get better, even though it already seemed popular enough to survive just the way it was. Then I watched an improved, excellent restaurant, which I elevated to three stars from two in early 2007, make yet another unnecessary advance.

I fell in love gradually, not all at once. The experience had a sweetness all its own.

Eleven Madison Park, which opened in 1998, now ranks among the most alluring and impressive restaurants in New York. It has reached this pinnacle because its principal owner, the indefatigable Danny Meyer, made a key move in 2006, bringing aboard the chef Daniel Humm, and because together they decided — out of pride, it seems to me, more than any commercial calculation — that this restaurant could and should shine as brightly as any other.

It already had the setting: that theatrically tall, marble and nickel-walled hall in the old Metropolitan Life Building, with grand windows onto the verdure of Madison Square Park. It already had a deep, broad wine list.

It just needed a bit more polish in its service and a lot more sparkle in its food. Over the last three and a half years, it has received precisely that, in measures that increased steadily since the arrival of Mr. Humm (and, soon after him, a new general manager, Will Guidara, and a new wine director, John Ragan, who has wisely supplemented familiar treasures from France with less familiar ones from other countries).

Mr. Humm’s French-grounded cooking, which bridges the classically saucy decadence of the past and the progressive derring-do of a new generation, drew notice from the get-go. He hadn’t been in place long before the city’s gluttons were atwitter (in the old-fashioned sense) about his way with suckling pig. He served it as a dense, tender brick of confit below the most crisply fatty sheet of crackling imaginable.

But instead of resting on his suckling laurels, he took this wrinkle of his reputation and ran with it, developing a tasting menu with five consecutive courses of suckling pig, including belly cooked sous vide and a roasted rack of tiny, exquisite chops. I sampled this last month, and it was superb.

The menu allows you to chart paths of varying lengths, from three standard courses, each of which you choose, to a “gourmand” experience of 11 unspecified courses that Mr. Humm selects for you. But even the briefest route includes numerous detours, because he has a particular enthusiasm for succinct, intense add-ons to be experienced before or between the principal dishes.

For example, every dinner begins with a five-piece row of single-bite amuse bouches, one with foie gras, another with salmon and another with sweetbreads nestled in a crunchy cornet.

Some of his best work comes in small packages, like a cup of “sea urchin cappuccino” that was presented as a little surprise during a meal whose climax would be a flawlessly cooked blue foot chicken for two with a brioche, foie gras and truffle butter stuffing under the glistening skin.

The cappuccino’s inclusion of cauliflower mousse below a peekytoe crab salad, sea urchin roe and a sea urchin foam made with cream and Cognac seemed to allude to (and perhaps borrowed from) a famous Joël Robuchon dish of cauliflower cream, lobster and sea urchin.

But Mr. Humm’s version was an altogether frothier and more indulgent affair, and whenever it threatened to become too much, a tart, astringent note flickered, reining everything in. The difference between good and great cooking of this kind is often knowing where the creamy, buttery, unctuous tipping point is — and stopping just shy of it. Mr. Humm does that expertly.

The charges came out of a survey sponsored by America’s Health Insurance Plans in which insurers were asked for some of the highest bills submitted to them in 2008.

The group, which represents 1,300 health insurance companies, said it had no data on the frequency of such high fees, saying that to its knowledge no one had studied that. But it said it did the survey in part to defend against efforts by the Obama administration to portray certain industry practices as a major part of the nation’s health care problems.

The health insurers, saying they felt unfairly vilified, gave the report to The New York Times before posting it online on Tuesday, explaining that they wanted to show that doctors’ fees are part of the health care problem.

The group said it had used Medicare payments for comparison because Medicare was so familiar and payments are, on average, about 80 percent of what private insurers pay.

“It’s the wild, wild West when it comes to prices of anything in the U.S. health care system, whether for a doctor visit or for hospital charges,” said Jonathan S. Skinner, a health economist at Dartmouth.

The situation is so irrational, said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton, that it simply cannot go on. “We will not emerge out of this decade with this lunacy,” Dr. Reinhardt said, adding, “You worry about credit card charges, you scream for consumer protection — why not scream for it here?”

But Dr. Robert M. Wah, a spokesman for the American Medical Association, said there was another side to the story: insurers’ low payments to doctors who enter into contracts with them and the doctors’ difficulties, in many cases, in getting paid at all. That is why, he said, doctors may simply abandon insurance plans. Then patients end up with extra fees because they have to go outside their networks.

Karen M. Ignagni, president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, had a different view, saying: “As we think about the health care debate, what’s been talked about is, What are the cost-sharing levels? What are the premium levels? How much do health plans pay? No politician has asked how much is being charged.”

Some of the health care legislation being considered by Congress would require insurers to increase their disclosure to patients of possible out-of-network costs. And President Obama has proposed changing how Medicare sets its payments to doctors and hospitals. But there are no specific proposals to control prices for out-of-network medical services.

In the survey, patients were insured but saw doctors who were out of their networks of care providers. Those doctors have no obligation to accept the out-of-network fee from insurers as payment in full. Patients may then be accountable for the balance.

“That is what generally happens,” said Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for the health insurers’ group. “The consumer is responsible.”

The survey looked at 10 companies that insure patients in the 30 most populous states; the companies provided some of the highest bills from 2008. Researchers excluded two types of charges that were likely to be erroneous: those that were greater than 10,000 percent of Medicare’s fees for a procedure, or more than 2,000 percent of Medicare’s fees and also more than 50 percent higher than the next-highest bill for the same procedure.

State laws protecting patients from getting stuck with medical bills in excess of their normal deductibles or co-payments vary widely, said Betsy M. Pelovitz, the group’s vice president for state policy. And, she said, the laws often offer little or no protection to patients who seek care outside their insurance networks.

In New York, patients with managed-care insurers cannot be asked to pay more than the applicable co-payment, deductible or co-insurance for an ambulance regardless of whether the provider is in or out of their network. In New Jersey, hospital emergency rooms treating Medicaid managed-care patients must accept Medicaid payments as payment in full and cannot bill patients extra. In Connecticut, a state law says it is “unfair trade practice” for medical providers to ask patients to pay more than a deductible or co-payment for services covered by their insurance.

But in general, patients hit with high bills from out-of-network doctors and hospitals may have little recourse, said Leslie Moran, senior vice president of the New York Health Plan Association. “When patients dig in their heels and say, ‘No, I’m not going to pay it,’ it sometimes goes to collection,” she said.

While there is no way of knowing how often doctors submit exorbitant bills, insurers tell America’s Health Insurance Plans that they see such bills “all the time, every day,” Ms. Pisano said.

The New York Health Plan Association provided more examples. In testimony at a state hearing in October, it told of a Long Island surgeon who charged $23,500 for an emergency appendectomy. The patient’s insurer paid its out-of-network fee of $4,629. The surgeon demanded the balance or said he would force the patient to pay. The insurance company paid the bill.