• Let’s face it: we were brainwashed. For years, nutritional gurus strummed a one-note samba all fats are bad and many of us played along, giving up some of our favorite foods. Like nuts.

03/28/00 - Should We Worry About Altered Foods?

• In the early 1990s, while almost nobody was looking, the biotech industry pulled off quite a coup. Led by industry giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis and Aventis, genetic engineers began commercializing an idea they'd worked on for years - tinkering with genes to make crops more resistant to insects and herbicides.  

02/15/00 -  The saga of soy.  Consumers believe soy is good food, and research shows they're partly right

• Americans have fallen in love with the humble soybean. Convinced that in its many incarnations - tofu, soy milk, dietary supplements - soy can prevent everything from heart disease to hot flashes to cancer, consumers have sent soy sales soaring. In the 12 months ending in October 1999, supermarket sales of soy foods were up 45 percent over the previous year, to nearly $419 million, according to Spins, a San Francisco market research company.

10/18/99 - Chocolate's not so dark secret

• I slip it reverentially into my mouth. Luscious, gooey, it melts on my taste buds, caresses my tongue. I stop talking, thinking, even breathing. I have but one sense: Taste. I have but one love: Chocolate. Nanoseconds later, the guilt sets in. I imagine my arteries seizing, my weight soaring. Yet I am powerless: I want more.

08/31/98 - Good for you, no matter how you slice them

• Ripening in the late-summer sun, filling garden baskets and salad bowls, reddening gazpacho in kitchen blenders, simmering in saucepans for spaghetti sauce, tomatoes might just be the best, maybe the only, reason for welcoming the end of summer. And beyond the tempting taste -- a blessed relief from the cardboard baseballs we get the rest of the year -- tomatoes are actually good for you.

07/27/98 - A childhood with no cones or hotdogs?

• When the seventh -- and posthumous -- edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock's ``Baby and Child Care'' was published recently, the guru's endorsement of a vegetarian diet for kids over 2 caused many nutritionists and doctors to choke on their leafy greens. Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, professor emeritus of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, thinks it's ``absolutely hopeless'' to try to get kids to eat enough vegetables to offset the loss of nutrients they would suffer from giving up meat and milk.

05/18/98 - If you feel the urge to fast, keep it short

• Jesus thought fasting was good for the soul. So do Jews, who fast on Yom Kippur; Muslims, who fast by day during Ramadan; and Catholics, who fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Ghandi fasted for political reasons -- to liberate India in the 1920s and 1930s. IRA member Bobby Sands did, too, fasting in prison in 1981 -- he died after 66 days -- to protest being denied prisoner-of-war status.

05/11/98 - The water fad has people soaking it up

• We've become a nation of water drinkers, so bitten by the bug to imbibe that we lug plastic bottles around all day, not just to stave off dehydration but to avoid just about every other ill from dry skin to constipation to fatigue, muscle weakness, and colds. Are we really that desiccated? Or just deluded?

12/01/97 - Grapefruit's unexpected side effect

• About six years ago, Canadian researchers discovered quite by accident that people who sloshed down their high blood pressure medicine with a glass of grapefruit juice got an extra kick: The drug became much more effective, apparently because it was absorbed better by the body. So much more effective, in fact, that some doctors now worry that people who usually use water to take certain calcium channel blockers may wind up lowering their blood pressure too steeply if they suddenly switch to grapefruit juice

08/04/97 - A `big bad ugly disease' - As incidence of diabetes rises, a major effort is launched to head off costly and debilitating illness

• Chances are, you think of diabetes as a problem of sheer bad luck -- either you get it or you don't. But preliminary studies have suggested that, far from being inevitable, diabetes may actually be preventable, even if you're among the 21 million Americans at higher-than-normal risk.

06/30/97 - Cutting through the baloney in high-protein diets

• High-protein diets, America's latest food fad, are like an overstuffed deli sandwich -- some healthy nuggets here and there surrounded by a fair amount of unhealthful baloney. That, at least, is the view of mainstream nutritionists, many of whom feel that Americans hooked on books like ``The Zone,'' by Barry Sears, ``Protein Power,'' by Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, and ``Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' are being fed a mixture of truths, half-truths and totally unproven assertions.

01/27/97 - Pill mills - weight loss centers pinning hopes for fat profits on diet drugs

• So. You're determined to lose those 20 pounds this year. Okay, maybe a little more. Really. Once and for all. You go to your friendly family doctor, who's been badgering you for years to gets those pounds off with diet and exercise.

01/20/97 - Tempest in a juice box

• Is your toddler is getting pudgy? Is your preschooler shorter than the other kids? Are your kids' teeth sprouting white spots or brown stains? If so, the culprit may be the juice craze that's sweeping the nation, as well-meaning parents stuff lunchboxes and backpacks with juice boxes and kids guzzle the stuff all day.

03/11/96 - The guru does lunch: hold the fat -- all of it

• Dr. Dean Ornish, the California guru whose radical approach to diet has been shown to reverse heart disease, settles in at the corner table at the Ritz cafe, facing Temptation. Temptation, his luncheon partner one recent winter day, points to the lobster bisque, the special Ritz cheeseburger with aged cheddar, the Boston cream pie.

01/15/96 - High-fat diet helping many with epilepsy

• Jason Simon, now 15 and an 8th grader in Sandwich, was only 9 on the day when, as he recalls, he "woke up one morning with a bunch of men standing around to take me to the hospital." He had no idea what was going on, but his family was terrified. During the night, his sister had heard him making "gurgling noises," the first sign Jason was having seizures.