Surveys and studies can tell us about American eating habits, mistaken beliefs about food, and insights into what foods might improve our health. Parade, the Sunday supplement magazine, partnered with the market research company NPD Group, to obtain some of the statistics quoted below.  Other statistics come from health newsletters published by universities.  (See sources below.)  Let's look as some recent data.

Perhaps you think there's no connection between elections and food--except for the fact that folks snack more when they stay up late to wait for election results.  If you think that, you probably don't live in Oregon or Colorado.  In both states, food (to be specific, "genetically modified organisms" printed on food labels) was on the ballot. We'll tell you about the outcome of the voting, the cost of the initiative, and the issues.  Then we'll touch briefly on Hawaii's vote on genetically modified seeds and the USDA's recent ruling on GM potatoes.

The supermarket sweetener shelves are getting more and more crowded.  Let's look at the specifics about 1) advantame, an artificial sweetener that the FDA just approved, which will soon join the crowd of other sweeteners with and without calories; 2) coconut palm sugar, a  natural product long a staple in Southeast Asia, which is becoming more popular in the U.S., along with other coconut products; and 3) agave nectar, another popular natural sweetener made from a Mexican plant. These last two contain--excuse my use of this bad word-- calories, but they have a more exciting taste than cane sugar. One has a hint of caramel and the other of maple.

Two university health newsletters I read regularly recently covered interesting scientific reports.  One tells  how much produce you should eat daily in order to increase your life span.  The second concludes that obesity is primarily caused by too much consumption of  cheap food. Let's delve into the evidence and conclusions of both studies.