In the popular Scottish folk ballad “Annie Laurie,” the main character is ready to “lay me down and dee.” But according to a new study from the University of Glasgow, the entire country may be ready to do the same.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 6,500 participants and discovered that almost the entire adult population of Scotland (97.5 percent) were either cigarette smokers, heavy drinkers, physically inactive, overweight or living on a bad diet – all risk factors for serious disease.

In many cases, there were multiple risk factors. For instance, 86 percent of people surveyed had at least two risk factors; 55 percent had three or more and nearly 20 percent had four or all five risk factors.

That’s right, 20 percent of the people in Scotland do everything wrong -- they drink, smoke, eat unhealthy food, fail to get even 30 minutes of daily exercise and – surprise – are overweight.

Do the people of Scotland have a death wish?

“The Scottish population seems to be living dangerously,” the authors write in the paper announcing their findings, gleaned from a national survey. “Only 2.5 percent of the population was without any of the five behavioral risk factors.”

Unfortunately, there may be even more bad news for Bonnie Scotland.

While some information was validated (for instance, the participants’ weight and smoking habits), researchers say most of the behaviors were self-reported by people who “might tend to give answers that would convey more favorable behaviors.”

In other words, the real situation may actually be a wee bit worse.

Are you of Scottish ancestry? Can you attest to this? Or can you defend the Scottish lifestyle? Speak up in the comments.

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Randy Dotinga writes: Here’s something to keep you up at night: People who have trouble falling asleep are three times more likely to die an early death, a new study shows.

That’s especially bad news since we are such a sleep-deprived bunch. In fact, another study showed that nearly one in five Americans doze off in meetings. It’s not clear, however, whether meetings can actually bore you to death.

If you haven’t nodded off yet ….the Body Odd is here to put this in perspective. Being tired can get so much worse. For a handful of people around the world, sleepless nights are truly a death sentence.

Just ask the members of an Italian family who live outside Venice. Its members have been dying for at least two centuries of a brain-destroying illness that's related to both mad cow disease and a deadly condition that kills cannibals.

The disease, fatal familial insomnia, kills by robbing people of their ability to sleep. "First they have uncontrollable sweating, then their pupils become these tiny pinpricks. Then they have trouble sleeping," said D.T. Max, author of "The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery."

Nothing helps, not sleeping pills (they actually make things worse) or warm milk or counting sheep. If afflicted people do get any sleep, they fail to go through all the stages. "They don't get the real sleep that makes you feel better," Max said.

Eventually, they start hallucinating, slip into a coma – and, invariably, die.

The disease appears to go back at least to the 18th century in the Italian family, whose members were long mystified why so many of them died before the age of 60. They thought it was "a disease of exhaustion or stress, brought on by sorrow or loss."

It wasn't. The inherited disease, which affects as many as half the members of an estimated 200 families around the world, appears when proteins known as prions start to malfunction and "literally eat holes in the brain" explains Max.

Prions cause other brain-eating conditions, too. Mad cow disease mad cow disease, which strikes people who eat contaminated meat, is the best known.

But even more gruesome, cannibals in New Guinea in the 1950s started dying of kuru, which is caused by eating contaminated human brain tissue. They've since changed their diet.

There's no cure for fatal familial insomnia, and for now, members of the Italian family continues to attract attention from scientists, journalists and gawkers. And they still wonder if one day they will start feeling tired and never stop.

There is a way to predict the future: Those in affected families can get a genetic test that will tell them if they're doomed to sicken and die in middle age. Some take the test and some don't, just like some refuse to have kids and others do despite the risk.

"It may look at times like they're condemning at least some of their children. But I don't really feel that way," Max says. "To live 60 good years isn't nothing. We're all going to die of something."

Have you struggled with insomnia? Tell us about your experiences in the comments.

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It’s a food lover’s nightmare: One minute you’re enjoying a delicious bit of pine nut pesto and the next, everything you taste is nauseatingly bitter.

That’s what happened to Christian Niles, a 29-year-old software engineer from San Francisco.

“I made a cream sauce with about a cup of pureed pine nuts and about an hour after the meal, I had a cookie with blueberries in it and the blueberries were really bitter,” says Niles. “Then everything just turned bitter.”

A bitter-metallic taste that hangs around for a week or so after eating the seeds is the hallmark of “pine mouth syndrome,” a curious condition that a recent paper in the Journal of Medical Toxicology calls “an emerging problem.”

First documented in 2001, the phenom remains unexplained and seems to involve raw, cooked or processed pine nuts of various species. While there’s been speculation the condition is associated with pine nuts imported from China, Niles says the batch that caused his taste distortion came from Italy.

It’s a fairly rare syndrome, but because pine nuts are becoming increasingly popular in dishes such as pesto and gourmet salads, reports of more cases are popping up.

The condition is mostly unexplained, but it could be nerve cells in the mouth misfiring, says Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. “At this moment, we think it’s the sweet taste receptors that aren’t firing off. In response to the lack of the taste of sweet, bitter come out more.”

He compares it to the “artichoke effect.”

“When you eat artichokes and then you drink red wine, the red wine tastes bitter,” he says. “The same thing happens if you brush your teeth and drink orange juice. Hirsch says he’s not only seen cases of “pine mouth,” he’s also had people come to him with “pineapple tongue” and “tomato tongue.” In all three cases, a bitter taste persists after people eat these particular foods.

Taste distortions can also be caused by certain medications, he says.

If you think you’ve got the strange condition, you don’t have to wait until the bitter end. A little sugar or artificial sweetener in food (or on the tongue) can help, as well as rinsing your mouth with watered-down milk of magnesia or chewing (non-mint-flavored) gum, says Hirsch.

Have you ever had a weird reaction to pine nuts or any other food? Share your comments!

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Could a quick spritz from a spray bottle make a man a better lover by treating his Quick Draw McGraw syndrome? Maybe.

At the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in San Francisco last week, a company called Shionogi Pharma briefed urologists and sexual medicine experts on test results for a drug called PSD502. “PSD502” may sound like some super-secret breakthrough, but men have been buying similar things from sex shops and the back of skin magazines for decades.

Does “Prolong” sound familiar? How about “Play Longer?” “Mandelay?” (Get it? Man Delay?) “Gibraltar?” As in rock of? Or my personal favorite, “Stud 100”? They’re all some form of cream, spray or wipe designed to numb your penis, which may not sound like something you would pay good money to do, but then maybe you -- or your lover -- do not suffer from premature ejaculation, or P.E.

Up to an estimated 30 percent of men do and P.E. is a real problem. It’s been defined as “ejaculation which is always or nearly always occurs prior to or within one minute of vaginal penetration,” which, as you can imagine, has “negative personal consequences.”

Men have tried everything from rubber bands, to masturbation endurance training (yes, really), to taking anti-depressants (because those drugs have a usually unwanted side effect of delayed ejaculation) to prolong their “latency.” Yet for years sexual medicine for males has been focused on another problem, erectile dysfunction. “It’s been all E.D. all the time,” Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a urologist, founder of San Diego Sexual Medicine and the editor of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, who attended the company’s briefing, told me. “So I’m pretty excited by the whole concept,” of PSD502.

He’s not excited because the concept is new; the drug is just a combination of two common topical painkillers, lidocaine and prilocaine. He’s excited because, finally, such a drug is being rigorously tested in real P.E. sufferers using metered doses rather than Stud 100 users trading anecdotes. And it seems to work. The men in the drug trials were pretty bad off. Before using the spray they lasted about 30 seconds. After spraying the stuff on their glans, and waiting five minutes, the men extended that time to a mean of 3.3 minutes, which may not win any stamina awards but represents a big improvement.

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Foreign accents conjure images of an exotic Ingrid Bergman, the mysterious lilt of socialite-turned- newshound Arianna Huffington, British heiresses like Jemima Khan and beautiful people from anywhere but here.

Glamorous, no? No, according to Robin Vanderlip.

The Fairfax County, Va., woman suffered a true slip of the tongue when she fell and hit her head in a stairwell at a 4-H youth conference. Two days later, after being released from the hospital, she suddenly began speaking English with a foreign accent. Now she’s suing for $1 million in damages from the National 4-H Council, the Washington Post reported this week.

While it seems the stuff of “Gilligan’s Island,” a very real condition can cause people who hit their heads, like Vanderlip, to suddenly develop Foreign Accent Syndrome. The rare malady occurs when a part of the brain affects speech is damaged, causing many patients to sound like they’re from Sweden due to the way they pronounce vowels.

The first widely known case was in World War II when a Norwegian woman was hit by shrapnel and developed an unfortunately strong German accent, which caused her to become an outcast in her country.

More recently, 35-year-old Sarah Cowell of England, who has never so much as been to China, suffered a migraine this spring and began speaking with a Chinese accent, according to The Guardian.

After Linda Walker, a U.K. woman, suffered a stroke she developed a Jamaican accent. “I’ve lost my identity because I never talked like this before,” she told the BBC in 2006. “I’m a very different person and it’s strange and I don’t like it.”

Still, for some, it can be even worse.

In April, a 13-year-old Croatian girl reportedly woke up speaking only German, a language she’d been studying in school but wasn’t fluent in. She completely lost the ability to speak in her native tongue. She likely had a condition known as bilingual aphasia, where people lose one of their two languages because different parts of the brain are involved, according to a Discovery News article.

That may also explain what happened to Sun Kwon on ABC’s “Lost” this season. The character, who spoke both Korean and English, lost her ability to speak English after hitting her head, although she could still read and write it.

Or maybe it was just the island’s mysterious mojo.

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Of all the body functions that humans have to contend with, throwing up has got to be the least favorite.

Unless you’re Matthew Clemmens, the Cherry Hills, N.J., man who pled guilty this week to committing “vomit assault” on police captain Michael Vangelo and the officer's 11-year-old daughter during a recent Phillies game.

Dubbed “Pukemon” by the press, Clemmens stuck his fingers down his throat and purposefully puked on Vangelo, who referred to the experience as the “most disgusting thing” he’d ever seen.

As grotesque as the incident was, things could have been worse. Much like yawning, vomiting can be contagious in humans, triggering a chain reaction like the one depicted in the movie “Stand by Me.”

While some speculate that “viral” vomiting is a survival trait that’s evolved in primates – if an ape eats a poisonous plant and pukes, the other apes eating that plant will do the same and survive – others believe the reaction is more of a toss-up.

“With yawning or vomiting or passing out when you see blood, it’s a variable degree of nature and nurture,” says Dr. Paul Kassab, who practices internal medicine at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center. “Vomiting is more nurture than nature, I would say, but for those who are sensitive to smell, it’s more nature.”

It mainly depends on the individual.

“If you and I and 10 other people are sitting in a room and one person vomits, I wouldn’t say everybody would automatically vomit,” he says. “One person may turn their head, another may try to help; another may gag or vomit because of the smell. It’s something you can’t predict, although you can predict it for yourself by knowing your own sensitivities.”

Alisha Holdener, 33, of Seattle, says she doesn’t get easily queasy, but her husband is a different story.

“My husband has a really bad gag reflex,” she says. “My daughter puked the other day and he was like, ‘I have to go!’ It just triggers something in him. He can’t smell it or see it, because he’ll throw up, too.”

As for Clemmens -- aka Pukemon -- he won’t be sentenced until July 30, but the consensus seems to be unanimous: he’s a chuck-up.

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