Nutrition

Fast-food restaurants are pondering how to deal with a new California law that tells restaurants to make more nutritional information available to customers. For now, eateries must make brochures with calorie counts and other nutritional information readily available. In 2011 they will have to post the information on their menus and menu boards. Panda Express, the Rosemead-based chain that dominates the Chinese food segment of the quick-serve market, is trying to get ahead of the curve.

Two federal lawmakers have introduced legislation to require fast-food and other chain restaurants to post calories on menu boards and food display tags. The chains also would have to put information about calories, fats, carbohydrates and salt on printed menus. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) on Thursday introduced the Menu Education and Labeling Act, called the MEAL Act for short.

Doctors recommend against eating more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day. Order a Denny's double cheeseburger and you'll consume 3,880 milligrams in one sitting, almost double the suggested daily allowance of salt. Denny's meals "are dangerously high in sodium," according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by a New Jersey man with the support of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group active in nutrition and food safety issues.

Vitamin D, the "sunshine vitamin," got its nickname because our bodies rely on a bit of sun exposure to manufacture the vitamin under the surface of the skin. But some recent research shows that a little bit of ultraviolet light also boosts vitamin D production where you might not expect it -- in fresh mushrooms. A serving of conventionally cultivated white mushrooms contains small amounts of one form of vitamin D, called ergocalciferol, or vitamin D2.

Susan Phillips' 4-year-old son Alex eats vegetables every day -- he just doesn't know it. Phillips purees his servings of green beans, spinach, sweet potatoes and squash and hides them in a peanut butter and brown sugar-sweetened porridge that she makes for him each morning. Without the deception, she says, Alex would eat no vegetables and very little fruit. His resistance is so strong that she has pretty much stopped putting them on his plate and requiring him to take a taste.

The precooked beef patties with the fake charcoal lines won't be on the menu at Castle View High School this fall. Instead, students will dine on freshly grilled hamburgers from grass-fed, hormone- and antibiotic-free cattle -- what is often described as natural or organic meat -- raised on the plains of eastern Colorado.

Anyone who ate gluten-free food five or 10 years ago might understandably opt to avoid such food forever after. In the old days, "we used to joke that when you got the food, you didn't know if you were supposed to eat the box or the contents," says Dr. Alessio Fasano, medical director of the Center for Celiac Research at the University of Maryland.

A long-running comparison of three diet plans found that the low-carbohydrate Atkins regimen and a Mediterranean diet rich in fish and nuts produced slightly greater weight loss than a low-fat program modeled on American Heart Assn. dietary guidelines.

Nagging by parents, teachers, doctors and just about every other grown-up hasn't rid school campuses of junk food. But even fifth-graders agree a new federal program just might help. The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program doesn't nag. It provides money so that schools can give students the food everyone has been saying they need to eat in order to combat obesity, malnutrition and their attendant ills.

It's been spotted in the hands of celebrities, a murky-looking drink with an exotic name: kombucha. The beverage originally hails from China, where it first earned a reputation as a health tonic nearly 2,000 years ago. In the U.S., kombucha has gone through several reincarnations. Its benefits haven't been proved. What has been shown, for the home-brewed versions, is that it isn't always safe. Kombucha became popular in the 1980s among the elderly and people with HIV.