Saccharin was banned in Canada in the 1970s, but regulators may allow its use once again.

There are a few reasons why American Coke turned away from sugar in the 1980s, but none of them are related to consumer health. This Reader's Digest article breaks down the history behind Coke's recipe change, explaining why the company continues using high-fructose cough syrup.

Long after humans developed the means to produce sufficient food to feed civilizations, scientific research focused on a wide variety of objectives, such as developing methods to preserve food quality (accomplished via frozen food), speeding up cooking (leading to the microwave), and lowering the cost of sweetening food, which high fructose corn syrup provides.

Humanity's ancestors evolved to wring more calories from sugary fruits by storing excess sugar as fat, an adaption that's culminated in many peoples' palettes preferring calorie-rich sweet. Now, the desire for sugar has both contributed to a widespread health crisis and been at the center of atrocities around the world.

Almost three decades after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” a “60 Minutes” segment on the use of Alar, a chemical sprayed on apples, drew national attention and inspired supermarkets and schools to remove apples from their shelves and cafeterias. That same year, the Environmental Protection Agency took action against the use of the chemical in food.

As part of government research, a group of young men were paid to eat standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—which revealed the dangers of unregulated food. The work was led by the first FDA commissioner, Harvey Wiley, who helped end the "century of the great stomachache."

Her 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” inspired many people to consider the chemicals used to grow their food, but Carson didn’t think that manufactured fertilizers needed to be banned from farming, writing that “The ultimate answer is to use less toxic chemicals so that the public hazard from their misuse is greatly reduced.” When she testified to Congress in 1963, she said, “I think chemicals do have a place.”

A typical gummy vitamin contains about the same amount of sugar in a single serving as one Sour Patch candy. It's linked to the increase in pediatric overdoses for products including multivitamins and melatonin. Gummy formulations also degrade quickly, so they often include much higher levels of the product in each serving than the label advertises—boosting overdose risks due to this unchecked variability.

The network was looking to correct the public perception that its programming was fraudulent, so it banned laugh tracks and fake applause from its broadcasts. The policy didn’t last long; within a few years, sitcoms were regularly “sweetened” with the sound effects.

Type 2 diabetics in the US risk dying from low blood sugar, an epidemic traced to a decades-old, multi-million-dollar drug industry campaign encouraging an average blood sugar level below 7%. Contemporary research correlated such levels with reduced risk of eye, nerve, and kidney damage and increased hypoglycemia risk.

The 1962 book warned against the use of DDT, a pesticide often sprayed over fields of crops, cautioning that it could be harmful if ingested in excessive amounts by humans. Some credit Carson’s book with inspiring the modern environmental movement and with encouraging the US to establish the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and ban the domestic sale of DDT in 1972.

Producers of foods like Healthy Choice frozen meals are placing "GLP-1 friendly" labels on their food, but there's no regulation about what that label means. Nutritionists say that GLP-1s can help reduce appetite, but healthy, balanced diets are a necessary complement to the medications. Data shows that about half of GLP-1 users quit these medications within a year and then rapidly regain weight, underscoring the importance of also prioritizing healthy eating.

Monosodium glutamate myths originate from a 1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, in which unpleasant symptoms after eating Chinese food were dubbed Chinese restaurant syndrome without medical data. Subsequent studies show this savory flavor enhancer—found in tomatoes, mushrooms, and other foods—is safe in moderation.

Scientists are trying to figure out if there are unique receptors that respond to the molecules that make up flavors we associate with calcium, blood, batteries, and other items that often escape dinner menus. Taste researcher Dr. Danielle Reed says the minimum evidence for a taste category typically involves identifying dedicated receptors and then removing them to show the taste vanishes.

The colorful candy combines Indigenous traditions with European confectionery techniques. Its symbolization reminds celebrants that death can be “sweet.”

A joint investigation by The Examiner and The Washington Post found that food, beverage, and supplement corporations and groups have paid registered dietitians on social media to promote content that goes against decades of scientific evidence on...

This hour-long 2016 documentary from Frontline, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and The New York Times examined the safety of dietary supplements. It noted that this then-$30B industry (it's at least doubled since then) suffers from irregularities and impurities. It warned that many Americans are unaware of the lack of regulatory oversight over these products.

Kids are hardwired to prefer sweets over greens, with sweetness a shorthand for calorie-rich and bitter flavor warning of potentially noxious plants. This holds true even in the womb, where fetuses have been seen via ultrasound scans grimacing as their hosts consume kale capsules. As they age into double digits and beyond, their taste cells and sense of smell diminish, leading to broader and less sensitive palates.

Food producers have been required to include specific labeling on their packages for sesame since new regulations went into effect in January 2023. In response, some food producers have decided to add small amounts of sesame to foods, including breads, rather than do the costly work of scrubbing their facilities of all possible sesame contamination.

The Poison Squad tells the story of government chemist Dr. Harvey Wiley who, determined to banish these dangerous substances from dinner tables, took on the powerful food manufacturers and their allies.

Most modern processed foods rely on a number of preservatives to stay fresh from production to our plates. The most common include citric acid (preservative and flavor), sodium benzoate (preservative), xanthan gum (thickening and stabilizing), carrageenan (thickening), and red dyes 3 and 4 (for color).

The compound monosodium glutamate has been identified in dairy, meats and vegetables, and provides an "umami"—Japanese for "tasty"—flavor to food. Studies in the late 1960s characterized MSG as harmful, but only when testing doses hundreds of times greater than what would be consumed in a typical diet.

Mexican Coke is sweetened with cane sugar (sucrose), which dissolves into equal amounts of fructose and glucose, whereas American Coke, which uses high-fructose corn syrup, contains more fructose than glucose.

Consumer Reports' tests of more than 20 supplement powders and shakes in 2025 found that more than two-thirds of them contain unsafe levels of lead. Some contained 10 times the amount of lead that's considered acceptable to ingest in a day. The levels they found, in some cases, were even higher than when they tested the products 15 years earlier.

In 2015, US policymakers put a halt to any government-funded work that would insert human stem cells into animals. The reasoning was that human cells might spread through the animal's body and perhaps to its brain, blurring the line between humans and nonhumans. The ban remains in place today even as gene-edited pig parts are being placed in humans.

The study’s data appear to confirm the policy shift. Still, since the study did not include an examination of infant diet, researchers can’t definitively say that the guideline shift led to dietary changes and thus directly caused the decline.