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We've long known that restaurant meals aren't a paragon of healthy portion sizes -- but a new study shows they may be even worse than we think. A whopping 96 percent of America's chain restaurant entrees fell outside the range of the USDA's recommendations for fat, saturated fat and sodium per meal, according to a new analysis from the RAND corporation, published in the journal Public Health Nutrition. "If you're eating out tonight, your chances of finding an entree that's truly healthy are painfully low," lead researcher Helen Wu, assistant policy analyst at RAND, told USA Today. Wu and her team evaluated 28,433 regular menu items and 1,833 children's menus at 245 restaurants around the country between February and May 2010. They looked at the ... Continue reading →

By: Lawrence R. Deyton, M.S.P.H., M.D. The health of every American is of the utmost importance to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of tobacco products. Our Center for Tobacco Products works to improve public health, with the goal of making sure that tobacco-related death and disease is part of America’s past, not its future. National Women’s Health Week, May 13-19, provides an opportunity for us to reach out and remind the women in our lives about the dangers of tobacco use and exposure to second-hand smoke — which claims the lives of nearly 200,000 women every year. Never starting to use tobacco products and quitting tobacco use – for those who do use tobacco – is proven to ... Continue reading →