July 6, 2018 — JAMA Internal Medicine this week is serving up a reason for coffee drinkers to feel good about their habit. In a large prospective study, researchers found that even heavy coffee drinkers tend to live a bit longer than non-drinkers. This finding includes people who drink up to eight cups a day. Researchers found up to […]
January 25, 2018 — Will taxing sodas bring us more alcohol consumption? That’s the heretical question raised by a new study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The answer they found is a bit complicated. But it’s clear that less soda can mean more beer. Many Choices for Food and Beverages Food and beverage taxes as a […]
November 29, 2017 — Inexplicably, the folks who have been selling us Chock Full o’Nuts coffee for roughly 80 years have decided to fess up. Their coffee is not chock full of nuts. In fact, it has no nuts whatsoever. The new packaging says so. Boldly. Right on the label. Clearing Up Confusion Chock Full o’Nuts is a New York […]
November 5, 2017 — The Washington Post wants to tell us “How Coca-Cola got Americans to drink diet soda again.” That’s an interesting spin, but it’s not clear yet that rebranding Coke Zero into Coke Zero Sugar has done all of that. What is clear is that the relaunch is clever and it’s doing well for this particular brand. […]
October 26, 2017 — Coke has a new CEO and a new corporate strategy that seems like it’s starting to work. You can find the essence of it in Coke’s new image advertising. Maybe the company that taught the world to sing is starting to shed some of the reputation issues that have dogged it for years now. A […]
October 11, 2017 — The soda tax we barely knew in Chicago is fading into history. Big soda is celebrating a win. Big soda haters are nursing their wounds. In the face of intense public pressure yesterday, the Cook County Board of Commissioners voted to roll back the county’s tax scheme on December 1. It only went into effect […]
September 21, 2017 — This week, a U.S. appeals court struck down a San Francisco law requiring sugar warnings on advertising for sugary beverages. The law dates to June of 2015. It called for the following warning: WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay. This is a message from the City and County […]
August 7, 2017 — Add one more U.S. city to the rolling soda tax experiment. Last week Chicago began taxing sweetened beverages at a rate of a penny per ounce. A lawsuit by the Illinois retail merchants association delayed the the tax by a month. On July 28, a judge dismissed the suit and cleared the way for the […]
July 12, 2017 — Coffee just traded up to a brighter halo of health. In Annals of Internal Medicine yesterday, two studies found an association between drinking the brew and living a little bit longer. Should everyone drink deeply of this “elixir”? Our advice? Drink it if you like it. A Modest Benefit These two studies cover diverse populations. […]
June 4, 2017 — A new commentary by Dean Schillinger and James Kahn warns us. We should be “mobilizing for a war on the home front against sugar-related morbidity and mortality.” But do we really need this battle for better health? Winding Down the War on Fat One battle we didn’t need, apparently, was the war on fat. The world mobilized […]
