I've done an extensive survey of all of the information about weight loss that you can find on the shelves of Border's and Barnes & Noble, and here are the results.

It seems as if the best way to lose weight and get in shape is a combo of the following: eating a lot of carbs, eating a lot of fat, cutting carbs out completely, drinking a lot of water, not eating any "white" foods at night like bread, rice, and pasta, eating just grapefruit, eating your meals in a mixed-up fashion (lunch for dinner, breakfast for lunch, etc), not eating after 8pm, eating a lot of soups, cutting out all candy, cakes, and processed foods, avoiding diet drinks, eating a Subway sub a couple of times a week, eating foods according to your blood type, eating foods according to color, eating a lot of fiber, training your brain to think like a thin person, eating like they do in France, eating like they do in China, not counting calories, making sure you count calories, taking vitamins and supplements, become a vegan, eating more meat, eat a lot of apples, eating only raw foods, and joining one of the weight loss organizations such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

If you follow the above rules, you should get in shape very quickly. You're welcome.

"Functional" foods have no official definition or regulation at the moment, but the FDA is hoping to change that soon, giving both manufactuerers and consumers some guidelines to go by. Functional foods are those that have something extra added to them that promises "a special [nutritional] punch," one which may or may not be backed up with solid science. For example, some products with herbs like ginseng and kava kava promise, respectively, to "energize" and "enlighten" - and because these things are directly attributed to the two herbs, that makes them "functional" foods. The functional label doesn't just apply to herbs, however. It applies to cereals that are fortified with extra nutrients, or juices that have calcium added to them.

Right now, adding extraneous nutrients to foods is a huge trend in the food processing industry. Consumers are looking for quick fixes to getting all the nutrition that they need, so when they're offered a soda with calcium added, they're going to opt for that over the regular product.

Calcium, of course, is not really the biggest problem. The FDA is more concerned with the companies that hint at claims of increased intelligence, stamina or energy, things that are difficult to prove and can be confusing for consumers. The companies themselves say that as long as their foods meet the existing food safety standards and the ingredients themselves are considered safe, they should be able to continue on as they are doing.

We'll have to wait to see what restrictions, if any, are implemented, but it seems likely that there will at least be some. After all, we live in a world where toy superman costumes come with warnings that "cape does not enable user to fly," so it is reasonable to assume that we will also see some sort of warnings associated with "functional" foods.

In the US, Canada and Chile (and I beleive soon in the UK) folic acid is added to bread-making flour under satutory regulation. Australia and New Zealand look likly to follow as the joint countires food regulator has asked for feedback on the proposal.

Each year, 300 to 350 pregnancies in Australia and around 70 in New Zealand are affected by neural tube defects. Women who are deficient in folic acid have been shown to have a higher risk of having a child with these defects. The addition of Vitamnin B (folic acid) will reduce these numbers significantly it has been suggested.

Although bread has been put forward as the most common food item ate by women of child bearing age the regulator has asked if the addition should be spread across more foods, including milk and yoghurt.

Stonyfield Farms is looking to make yogurt even healthier. In Canada, their Organic YoBaby Plus Fruit & Cereal Yogurt, made for infants and toddlers, is now fortified with MEG-3 brand omega-3, giving it the same heart-healthy fatty acids that are found in foods like fish. Omega-3 is also found in breast milk in the same concentration that Stonyfield is using in its yogurt; it was likely the inspiration for the idea to add MEG-3 to the product in the first place, as soft yogurts are considered to be a good "transition" to solid foods.

Yogurt isn't the only food to recently gain the benefits of omega-3s. Some research is being done with pork and omega-3s. The question is whether the infusion of the fatty acid into other foods will be able to reproduce all the health benefits of the naturally occurring acids in fish.

Trader Joe's has recently released a new line of supplements. The Milk Chocolate Calcium supplements are foil-covered balls of milk chocolate that contain 500 mg of calcium each, which is 50% of the recommended daily minimum. The chocolate isn't quite as rich and smooth as the rest of the chocolate that Trader Joe's carries, but this is hardly surprising - as this chocolate is not classified as candy, but as a nutritional supplement. It is a pleasantly sweet milk chocolate and is perhaps ever so slightly grainy, though the chocolate does melt fairly smoothly in your mouth after several moments. Compared with other chocolaty nutritional supplements I've had, these are far and away the best. While I won't be replacing any of my favorite chocolate snacks, each ball contains only 45 calories, and with 50% of my daily calcium requirement, I'll be having them on a regular basis.

The classification as a nutritional supplement also means that directions for use had to be put on the container, unlike regular tins of chocolate, where people are left to their own devices to discern they must  "Chew thoroughly before swallowing."

[Photo by Nicole Weston]