I'm not a big fan of the book Eat This, Not That. It purports to tell you which foods you should be eating in restaurants instead of other foods. Sometimes the comparison is good, but other times it just seems to save a person 100 calories here or a few grams of fat there and doesn't seem worth the bother (and sometimes the "eat this" choice has more carbs or salt). But I guess it's good to have the info.

Now Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko exposes some restaurant secrets. Why don't some chains want us to know the nutritional numbers of their foods? What foods are often cooked with other foods in the kitchen? Do some fast food chains actually have healthier options than sit down restaurants?

Gourmet Boutique has issued a recall of 286,000 lbs of deli luncheon meat for possible contamination by listeria. The meats were used in sandwich wraps and other ready-to-eat products. The USDA has classified this recall as Class I, "reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death," or what I would call "pretty damn serious."

The list of potentially affected wraps and other ready-to-eat products from the company are listed here.

[via: Consumerist]

Want to lose weight but you find yourself snacking all day long? Here are two tips that might help.

MSN money asks use to to take a moment and imagine if no one in the US were overweight. I lose. I can't do it! I know so few people, myself included, who aren't overweight (they consider overweight to be 20 or more pounds too heavy). However, I'll humor them by suspending disbelief, and attempting to imagine.

MSN says, "add the savings up on health, food, clothing and efficiencies, and you could buy a professional home gym for every U.S. household -- or hand each $4,270 in cash." There would be a total of $487 billion dollars in national savings. Read the article for details on how they came up with that number.

What would you do with your extra $4,270 dollars? I'd definitely go out for lots of fancy dinners with no skimping on the dessert course. Hmm.. that would defeat the point though, wouldn't it?

I have a co-worker who frequently sends me links to fun/geeky/wacky food-related things on the interwebs. This morning, he sent me two bacon-centric links within a matter of minutes. Because apparently, the whole world has bacon on the brain.

The first was this report from the Digital Journal, announcing that the Department of Public Health in Los Angeles had banned the sale of bacon-wrapped hot dogs. The reason given for the ban by Terrence Powell of the LA County Health Department? "Bacon is a potentially hazardous food." Street vendors can continue to sell bacon, provided that they buy a new cart at the cost of $26,000, otherwise they have to remove the offending item from their menu.

If you are mourning the loss of bacon from your outdoor food carts, xkdc reminds us that one can still cook bacon at home, albeit to the serious detriment of individual health. So funny and so, so true.

Thanks Eric!

So many of us are lactose intolerant these days, but there are so many milk substitutes that it's difficult to know where to turn! Find out where to go, and how to incorporate these substitutes into your cooking.

It sounds to good to be true -- a berry that makes sour things taste sweet!

The berry is very real. It's called "miracle fruit -- that's actually what it's called -- though the scientific name is Synsepalum dulcificum for those of you who want to get technical. And more for the technical folks, a protein in the fruit binds to taste buds and alters the tongue's so-called sweet receptors to activate when sour foods are eaten. Sour things taste sweet for about an hour after the berry is eaten.

It may seem just a novelty or a fun foodie trick to do at parties, but there could be some health and medical uses for the berry once the science people figure it out. I can think of a few now: lose weight by tricking your taste buds into thinking that extremely low calorie foods are actually as sweet as dessert, and any other use in which people need a sugar substitute.

[via: Gimundo]

The news couldn't be more timely with Cinco de Mayo right around the corner.

According to the Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a native Mexican diet full of soups, legumes, tomato-based sauces, meat and Mexican cheeses seems to help prevent breast cancer. Whether the foods and dished are topped with a chili or two wasn't stated, but Hispanic women believe it's the chili in Mexican food that may prevent breast cancer.

So with Cinco de Mayo coming up and resources featuring Mexican recipes, now might be a great time to add Alondigas Soup, bean-based dishes, and moles (might it be the chocolate?) to your recipe repertoire.

But don't let this be an excuse to gorge on greasy, deep-fried tortilla chips!

You've probably had this happen to you. You've just made yourself a nice cup of tea or coffee and you go into the fridge to get the milk and you open it and it has gone bad. So you have to put on your shoes and jacket and head out to the store to get more.

That's what happened to me today. My fat free milk went bad and smelled like...vinegar or something else that milk shouldn't smell like. So I had to go out into the rain and walk up the street to the convenience store.

I'm still not sure why it went bad so quickly. The date on it was May 2. My roommate has a jug of 2% milk with a date of May 1 and that's still fine. Does milk go bad quicker if it has less fat in it?

You've seen them before. Those fliers tacked onto telephone poles (wait, do such things still exist?!), duct taped to street light posts, or even stapled onto the bulletin board in your doctor's office: "Wanted: women for a [insert health condition here] study."

You've never thought about actually volunteering for one of those studies.

Until now.

Researchers in the UK want 150 women who are willing to eat one bar of chocolate every day for a year. The study's purpose is to determine whether a natural compound found in cocoa, the main ingredient of chocolate, could cut the risk of heart disease among women with diabetes.

Unfortunately, you don't get to pick which chocolate you get to eat. A Belgian chocolatier has created a chocolate especially for this study.

According to Lauren Murrow of Men's Health magazine, processed-food purveyors and restaurants add salt to dishes so we don't miss natural flavors and fresh ingredients. I, for one, still miss them.

Lauren has come up with a list of the 20 saltiest foods in America. As you check out the list, keep in mind that our daily recommended amount of salt is about one teaspoon (2,300 milligrams).

One of the most surprising dishes on the list was number 16, "The Saltiest 'Healthy' food", Chili's Guiltless Grill Chicken Platter with 2,780 mg sodium. This platter actually has more sodium than Chili's 1,890-calorie Country Fried Steak with sides, toast, and gravy.

The number one saltiest dish in America: Romano's Macaroni Grill's Chicken Portobello at 7,300 mg sodium. That's over three days worth of sodium!

View the whole list on MSNBC.

You know when you are eating your fourth tofu salad of the day for the eighteenth day in a row of this hell we call "diet before bikini season?" And on the salad there is a slab of stupidly healthy tofu that when you bite into it, you close your eyes and tell yourself it's actually a piece of chocolate cake?

Wait, am I the only one who does that?

SoyJoy Bars are something like that.

The old story was that expectant mothers should eat fish to help their growing babies' brains. Then we heard that eating fish was dangerous to the health of the baby. If you're pregnant, no fish!

Well let it be known that once again, fish is good for your baby when you're pregnant!

Obviously, fish was never really bad for expectant mothers; it was simply that some certain types of fish that had high levels of mercury. All the news about "fish," "mercury," and "pregnancy" must have been confusing. The most recent research doesn't seem to sound like anything new, just a reminder that fish is, in fact, good for the brain, as "Preschoolers whose mothers regularly ate low-mercury fish during pregnancy may have sharper minds than their peers...Researchers found that among 341 3-year-olds, those whose mothers ate more than two servings of fish per week during pregnancy generally performed better on tests of verbal, visual and motor development."

Just remember that it's fish with low levels of mercury, so make sure you do your homework.

I have a feeling that this story is going to divide Slashfood readers.

A couple in Michigan lost custody of their 7 year-old son after the father gave a Mike's Hard Lemonade to his son at a Detroit Tigers game. The father claims that he had no idea that the drink contained alcohol, because he had never heard of it and had never tried it.

My first reaction was "yeah, right," but then I read the details.

We've had more than a week's respite from the never ending flow of food recalls, in which no news was good news. Unfortunately, the recall hiatus wasn't meant to last.

White Wave, the maker of Silk soymilk beverages, has issued a recall on 11 ounce, single serve bottles of the chocolate flavor soymilk because, of all things, the product may contain actual milk. So if you're drinking the soymilk due to lactose intolerance or allergies, you need to switch to something else for the time being.

The bottles in question have a UPC code of 2529360028 and a "use by" date of 05 07 08 (May 7, 2008). If you have questions, you can call the company at 1-800-587-2259. Otherwise, just return the carton to the point of purchase for a full refund.