Nutrition

Diners at California Pizza Kitchen last week found some enticing new offerings such as white chocolate strawberry cheesecake, Baja-style tacos with sautéed mahi-mahi, and a Moroccan-spiced chicken breast salad. But gone from the menu are those often-revealing calorie counts that the restaurant has listed for each item since July 1. The Los Angeles-based pizza and pasta chain dropped that data when it printed new menus last week, in part because customers just didn't like it much.

The least nutritious mineral has to be gold, because it's nonreactive. It scarcely ever combines with other elements. But just because it's so inspiringly incorruptible, at various times people have thought it was a good idea to put some on their food, either to suggest nobility or (they hoped) bolster their health. Fortunately for their pocketbooks, gold is highly malleable and can be thriftily beaten down to 1/250,000 inch thick.

The multifarious  symbols, icons and exclamatory nutrition claims that adorn food packaging may sell products, but a group of independent experts in nutrition and communication acknowledged Wednesday that a patchwork of "front-of-package" nutrition ratings has failed dismally to improve Americans' eating habits. And they outlined guidelines to make future labeling more helpful. A  panel of the National Academy of Sciences concluded Wednesday that if these prominent labels are to be useful guides to eating right, they should give consumers a minumum of consistent, basic facts about a food item: the  calorie content of a portion size that is easily understood, as well as its sodium, saturated-fat and trans-fat levels.

A team of scientists has found a way to boost the protein, zinc and iron content in wheat, an achievement that could help bring more nutritious food to many millions of people worldwide. Led by UC Davis researcher Jorge Dubcovsky, the team identified a gene in wild wheat that raises the grain's nutritional content. The gene became nonfunctional for unknown reasons during humankind's domestication of wheat.

News of the "Twinkies diet" is hard to swallow – especially amid all the recent angst about marketing fast food to kids . To top it off, the news comes from an unusual source. [ For the record, 2:35 p.m. Nov. 9: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said Mark Haub was a professor at the University of Kansas. He is from Kansas State University.] Mark Haub, a nutrition professor at Kansas State University, went on a convenience store junk food diet of Twinkies, Nutty Bars, Little Debbies and other sweets to see whether weight loss was all about calorie counting, no matter the calories, CNN reports . In two months, Haub says he lost 27 pounds, lowered his body mass index and even lowered his level of "bad cholesterol.

Most shoppers know that cabbage and carrots are smart choices at the grocery store. But it might surprise people that Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Ritz Bits Peanut Butter Chocolatey Blast crackers and Kid Cuisine Magical Cheese Stuffed Crust Cheese Pizza meals are billed as "Smart Choices" under a controversial new food-rating program. A logo adopted by food company giants is showing up in major supermarkets: a green "Smart Choice" check mark, meant to replace the blizzard of health labels that clutter food package fronts: "Sensible Solution, "Smart Spot," and so on. Sponsors say the logo will help an overweight and overwhelmed public make better food choices in a way that reflects how people really shop.

The old admonition "Don't play with your food!" has no place when teaching children about nutrition on the computer. Children get to jump in, get messy and play with food in "Millie Meter's Nutrition Adventure" and "Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat From Your Head to Your Feet!" The two titles approach nutrition in different ways.

More than 120 Spanish-speaking parents of Pacoima schoolchildren this week will celebrate the successful completion of an eight-week basic health and nutrition course taught by community leaders. The program began last October, when 15 "promotoras," or lay teachers, recruited from parent and community centers enrolled in a 20-hour training course developed by the FamilyCare Healthy Kids Collaborative in Pacoima.

Children born during China's 1959-61 famine were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia, confirming a link between nutritional deficiency and the mental illness, researchers have reported. Schizophrenia afflicts roughly 1% of the global population and tends to run in families, but the incidence of the illness has been found to have doubled during famines in China and the Netherlands.

So you didn't eat your vegetables yesterday and you really overdid it with the double-chocolate cake. Don't torture yourself with guilt. Just try to do better in the next few days. That recommendation comes from the American Heart Assn., which has issued reduced-guilt guidelines aimed at getting people to eat right over several days or a week, instead of obsessing over every day or every meal.