FOX News reports that one mother was outraged after school officials told her 4-year-old daughter that her home-packed lunch was not healthy enough to eat.   A lunch inspector at a N.C. school told the student she couldn’t eat her turkey sandwich, banana, potato chips and apple juice. Instead, the inspector recommended a USDA-approved lunch: one [...]

The Huffington Post’s Charity Curly Matthews asks “why does the all best comfort food have to be so packed with butter, sugar or bacon?  She suggests five comfort food makeovers that consumers should try.  Smart thinking on her part as brands look for ways to serve up better4you recipes to moms.    Bacon and Cheddar Macaroni [...]

More than nine of 10 Americans consume fewer fruits and vegetables than the daily amount recommended by the U.USDA guidelines, according to the “Fruits and Veggies — More Matters” health initiative, a national program aimed at increasing consumption of plant-based foods.  Don’t blame it on the nutritionist community.   Nutritionists have been talking to us for [...]

Two studies from the University of Rhode Island prove that men eat faster than women.  Men are faster eaters than women particularly at lunch, where men ate about 80 calories per minute, while women ate about 52 calories per minute. Also men consume both liquid and solid foods faster than women. Researchers also discovered that people [...]

Today’s Wall Street Journal discusses how the vitamin market is due for a fall based on results from recent large-scale human studies, including two reports published this month in leading medical journals.  The studies suggest that multivitamins and many other dietary supplements often don’t have health benefits and are a waste of money for those without a specific [...]

Brands are using apps for all sorts of messaging.  Now there’s a free iPhone app for consumers who are trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle or diet.  NutriScanner 1.0 offers nutrient information from any standard NLEA label.  Supermarket shoppers can scan and review nutrition info on the label including serving size, calories, carbohydrates, fat, protein, and weight.  A simple [...]

A new study among U.K. mothers of children ages 3 through 6 shows that parents who pressure their kids to eat vegetables are more likely to produce picky eaters.  The study also found that food avoidance was more common in children of emotional temperaments, as well as those of parents who use food to shape behavior and don’t encourage a balanced [...]

Better4You brand marketers can learn something about what to call overweight children from a new survey by Yale University. The survey finds that parents prefer that doctors avoid the terms “fat” and “obese” and prefer the term “unhealthy weight,” when referring to their children.  More than 60 per cent of the 445 parents surveyed said referring to [...]

With childhood obesity a growing concern, Miami-Dade preschools and schools are making it easier this year for students to get a fresh, healthy meal at breakfast, lunch and snack time, too.  An estimated 17 percent of American kids ages 2 to 19 are obese, and the Miami-Dade County Health Department received almost $15 million in [...]

Although most kids don’t really write the family food shopping list, a research team from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that children do use manipulative nagging to get mom to buy specific items which may not be too healthy.  The researchers found that kids’ tendency to nag about particular products is the [...]