to start stocking up on it.

On Tuesday, the French millers association said in Paris that breadmaking was being endangered by the public's loss of appetite for traditional breads like the celebrated baguette.

Warning that such breads could consequently go the way of the dodo, the association said that each French person ate nearly 2.2 pounds of bread each day at the start of the century, only a pound a day in 1945 and now ate only a third of that quantity daily.

The main culprits, it said, were the introduction into French diets of new breakfast foods such as cereals as well as claims by nutritionists in the 1970s and `80s that bread was fattening.

Naturally, the association said that bread was an essential element to nutritional balance, that it protected the digestive tract and that the public should eat twice its current bread intake for better health.

*** In other matters of health, meanwhile, the easiest way to determine the risk of a heart attack or stroke may be to measure the level of "good'' cholesterol in the blood, a team of Canadian researchers said this week.

Currently, most people worry about their ratio of low-density cholesterol -- the "bad'' type -- to high-density or "good'' cholesterol, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But researchers at Montreal General Hospital found in a follow-up study of 3,678 participants from a 1970s-era survey that the ratio of high-density cholesterol to total cholesterol in the blood was just as accurate in predicting future risk of heart problems.

A higher level of good cholesterol seems to prevent bad cholesterol from forming fatty deposits that block arteries and veins, the most common cause of heart disease.

Determining the level of bad cholesterol in the bloodstream is more difficult than measuring for good cholesterol, which makes a test with the latter preferable, study author Steven Grover wrote in the medical journal.

*** If you've found that you've been turning your nose up at steak and burgers with increasing frequency lately, don't worry. According to a British anthropologist, you're simply part of a growing social movement of worldwide animal lovers.

"There is a clear trend,'' Nick Fiddes of Edinburgh University said in the English city of Newcastle this week, "to move away from red meat to white meat, white meat to fish...This reflects deep changes...(having) to do with the way in which society relates to animals.'' According to Fiddes, who was speaking at an annual gathering of scientists, the meat industry's efforts to bolster faltering sales in the West will likely backfire, as advertising campaigns focusing on the flavour of meat could end up turning more people towards vegetarianism.

"The meat industry has made mistakes in not addressing these issues,'' Fiddes later told a news conference. "Meat marketing has pursued short-term goals of promoting sales.'' In his speech to the British Association Festival, which promotes science in Britain, Fiddes warned that tension between meat-eaters and vegetarians is also likely to grow. "As...positions become entrenched,'' he said, "we will see more and increasingly radical anti-meat activities, like the non-violent direct-action political theatre pioneered...by anti-motorway and other environmental campaigners.'' Supporting Fiddes' contention of growing vegetarianism, the number of non-meat eaters in Britain has increased over the last 10 years to 3.5 million people, according to the country's Vegetarian Society. That represents a doubling of the number in 1985.

*** On the subject of vegetarianism, "Chris P. Carrot,'' a new mascot that animal rights activists hope will promote vegetarian eating habits, found his first foray into Texas cattle country tougher than expected this week.

Armed with buttons reading "Meat Stinks,'' the seven-foot-tall orange carrot character was turned away from at least one elementary school in the meat-loving state, while the principal of another warned students not to talk to strangers when he waddled in, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said in a news release.

Undeterred, PETA announced that the carrot would continue its "Eat Your Veggies, Not Your Friends'' campaign outside school areas if authorities ban him from school grounds.

Among the leaflets that he's ready to distribute to Texas schoolchildren is one reading: "Hamburgers are really cows who have been separated from their families and killed. Bacon and bologna are really little piggies who are taken in crowded, smelly trucks to their death.'' *** Turning to chocolate, citizens of Belgium and Luxembourg each eat 11 pounds of cocoa per year on average, putting them No. 1 in the world chocaholic rankings.

Switzerland ranked second in the five-year averages published this week by the International Cocoa Organisation, but led the world in consuming more than 21 pounds of chocolate confectionery per person.