Beverages

With commercial airliners more crowded and heightened security measures threatening long delays at airports, private charter jet companies and rental car agencies may be beneficiaries of the growing airport headaches. A Zogby International poll released last week found that 42% of likely voters said that enhanced pat-down search techniques and the increased use of full-body scanners by the Transportation Security Administration would cause them to use a different mode of transportation.

Two beverages among the most likely to be sipped at a beach or summer barbecue ? margaritas and Kool-Aid ? are working hard to stay in the mix this holiday season. Sauza, owned by Beam Global Spirits & Wine, a unit of Fortune Brands Inc., is teaching women how to make winter margaritas. Kool-Aid, owned by Kraft Foods Inc., made its first appearance in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, with its Kool-Aid Man on a skateboard. Sauza is looking to benefit from a trend toward entertaining at home.

Caffeinated alcoholic drinks that have been making college kids sick on campuses in several states may not be around much longer -- if news report of their proposed demise are correct. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has supported such a ban, reports Tuesday on his website that the Food and Drug Administration plans to ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks like Four Loko and Joose as an "unsafe food additive to alcoholic beverages. " The statement also says the Federal Trade Commission will tell manufacturers that selling these unsafe alcoholic drinks is illegal.

If you're a regular reader of Booster Shots, you are well aware that drinking lots of sugar-sweetened beverages is bad for your health. Primarily, those empty calories do damage to your waistline and are a major contributor to the steady weight gain of Americans over the last several decades. But a study published online Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn. gives women another reason to avoid the drinks: They can increase the risk of gout. According to the Mayo Clinic , “Gout is a complex form of arthritis characterized by sudden, severe attacks of pain, redness and tenderness in joints, often the joint at the base of the big toe. …  An acute attack of gout can wake you up in the middle of the night feeling like your big toe is on fire.

Even by the extreme standards of typical college mayhem, the small-town college party in central Washington this month looked bad. Police were initially called to a supermarket parking lot, where they found a girl passed out in the back seat of a car next to a boy with a bloody nose. At the private house the two had just left, three girls were sprawled on a bed, a barely conscious young man was being dragged out of the backyard, a girl was prostrate on the bathroom floor and three young people were splayed senseless in a car outside.

The overhaul of gift stores, beverage stands and restaurants at Los Angeles International Airport moved ahead Wednesday when the City Council approved the first round of new concession contracts and rejected further investigation of the bidding process. Some of the outlets could be in place by summer, officials said. The nine contracts, which affect Terminals, 4, 5, 7 and 8, were awarded on a 12-1 vote with Councilman Tony Cardenas the only holdout. Cardenas had urged his colleagues to postpone the vote and resume a probe by a special council panel into whether the bids were evaluated "fairly, responsibly and legally" by airport officials.

A 2 1/2-year effort to overhaul concessions for passengers at Los Angeles International Airport made significant progress Monday when a special City Council panel approved four of five food and beverage contracts that had been contested by competing companies. The five-member Board of Referred Powers voted 4 to 1 to award three contracts to Areas USA, based in Florida, and one contract to the THS-Marbella Food Service Partnership, which involves the Delaware North Companies, a longtime concessionaire at LAX. Also on a 4-1 vote, the board threw out all bids for the most lucrative food and beverage contract — a decision that will force Los Angeles World Airports, the operator of LAX, to re-solicit proposals at a later date.

It's not often that one hears a Jewish person refer to Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement, marked by repentence and fasting — as their favorite holiday, but for a good friend of mine living in Jaffa, Israel, Yom Kippur is top of the line. "It's almost like the world is on pause," she explains. "The silence is deafening. I don't think there's any other place in the world where everything stops completely just because it's a holiday; no cars on the roads, no planes in the sky, no open stores, no shopping.

If you're drinking bottled tea beverages in order to reap the benefits of polyphenols in tea, you may be wasting your money. A new study shows that at least some bottled beverages that boast of having tea content actually have paltry levels of polyphenols. Polyphenols are antioxidants that are thought to promote health by protecting the body's tissues against oxidative stress and related cell damage that can cause cancer, heart disease and inflammation. A typical cup of brewed black or green tea contains 50 to 150 milligrams of polyphenols.

To frequent fliers, the proposal to replace Los Angeles International Airport's stale array of restaurants and shops probably doesn't seem very controversial; in a recent J.D. Power survey of airport quality, passengers ranked LAX 19th out of the 20 biggest airports in the U.S., and gave its fast-food chains and other eateries two stars out of five. But then, those fliers aren't subject to a big lobbying campaign by the current operators, which stand to lose six-figure contracts if city officials kick them out. What seems like an easy decision is clearly tormenting City Councilman Tony Cardenas, for example.