Remember the old adage often repeated to young children: "Beware of strangers with candy?" Well, it's more relevant than ever. There are people with self-serving intentions tempting your children with sugary treats. Only they're not strangers. They're the athletes and pop superstars shilling Coke, Pepsi and other sugary beverages to...

I love the Bern. I even feel the Bern occasionally. But I'm afraid he unwittingly stumbled into a sticky Big Soda trap last week when he declined to support the soda tax that Philadelphia's popular mayor Jim Kenney is fighting for.

"It would be regressive and hurt poor...

Something astonishing happened last week. After months of bad publicity, the University of Colorado decided to return a million dollar "gift" it had received from Coca-Cola in 2014 to establish an advocacy organization called the Global Energy Balance Network.

In case you missed the initial controversy, a New...

Has our nation's top doctor, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, turned into a spin doctor? His latest public health initiative, the Step It Up campaign to promote walking, is so misleading that it's got me wondering whose health he's protecting: the American people's or the food and beverage industry's?

The...

This is the first generation of American children expected to live shorter lives than their parents.

If that's not a call to action, I don't know what is.

It's what moved me four years ago to partner with Katie Couric and Director Stephanie Soechtig to produce the film Fed...

Something has to give. We have a serious health crisis in America and it's impacting a whole lot more people than the Ebola virus. Over the past 30 years childhood obesity rates have tripled; 1 in 3 adults are overweight or obese; and over 29 million people have diabetes. All...

The beverage industry's got a growing public relations problem. Soda sales are dropping as more folks realize just how bad for us this stuff is. That's why Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group just announced that they're going to voluntarily reduce the calories in their sugary drinks by...

We thought it was a story from The Onion until we saw the headline running on the CNN ticker:

Study: Diet soda helps weight loss...Diet Soda Better Than Water For Weight Loss

This according to Dr. Jim Hill at University of Colorado's Anschutz Health and Wellness Center.

Dr. Hill's...

Something revolutionary happened last week and you probably didn't hear about it. Tesco, a multinational grocery retailer -- the second largest in the world -- made a moral decision to protect its customers that guaranteed it would lose money. A supermarket behemoth with over six thousand stores, Tesco made an...

Last month, when we released the poster for our film Fed Up, the prominently featured initials F and U made it an instant controversy with the Motion Picture Association of America. Less controversial, almost an after thought, was the tagline on the poster "Congress says Pizza is a...

We need your help -- actually, we all need each other's help!

Although dinner might be just about our only daily opportunity to sit down together, catch up and eat a healthy meal, we tend to be too busy/stressed/tired (you can throw in a dozen other reasons) to cook ourselves....

Coca-Cola has gone too far. Just two weeks ago, Coca-Cola made a big show of "caring" about our country's obesity epidemic, releasing an ad that declared, "We are concerned, we care and we are all in this together." The next week, they announce their successful seduction of our children's favorite...

Are we really going to help the children of our nation lead healthy lives, or not? If we are, we'll have to stop pretending it's a good idea to give the new face of Pepsi, aka Beyoncé, the honor of singing our national anthem at President Obama's second inauguration. It's...

Flirtatious emails. Jealous threats. Consensual sex. Scandalous? Hardly. Try... Foolish. Ubiquitous. All too human adult behavior. And frankly none of our business.

The real scandal is that this type of behavior -- stumbled upon via highly questionable investigative practices -- is what garners nonstop media coverage and glaring headlines...

It's time to start naming names. So, here goes: Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Kelly Clarkson, Elton John, Lebron James, David Beckham and Michael Jordan. These are just a few of the athletes and singers who've recently lent (well, OK, sold) their name, cachet, and...

Last spring, right on the heels of one of the biggest events in his life, his son's wedding -- and with the eyes of the world upon his family -- Prince Charles came to the United States to deliver a speech at Georgetown University about the future of food.

There's...

Dear Paula Deen,

I can't stop thinking about you. Worrying, really, because from the text of your tweets it sounds like you aren't really on board for the lifestyle overhaul your diabetes diagnosis demands. I am sure you are stressed too from the public relations debacle your affiliation with a...

The scary issues of raising kids in the digital age are well documented, but I want to red flag the subtle changes in parenting that occur because of the ubiquitous cell phone, without our even noticing. One of those very moments occurred in my house this week.

It's after dinner...

Did you know Coca-Cola's first television ad aired on Thanksgiving Day in 1950? It was part of a special live production featuring the ventriloquist Edger Bergen and his sidekick Charlie McCarthy? It was a humble foray into the new but powerful advertising medium for the soft drink giant....

Laurie: It's pretty great having chefs as friends, but when they make house calls, well, that's off the charts. Last week, Daniel and Mirra, the cross-country traveling duo behind my favorite web series The Perennial Plate landed for their first visit to Martha's Vineyard.

A tad road weary,...