Crazybananas

Taking pictures of food is a fun way to share with friends and family what you ate.

We are all guilty of whipping out our phones to snap a photo of our food at dinner, then making it look artsy and hipster before uploading it to Instagram for all our friends to see, secretly hoping they will be jealous of the delicious meal we are about to consume.

While many restaurants are banning customers from snapping photographs of food while in the dining room due to the obnoxious distraction it causes, a researcher believes this trend of instagramming pictures of food needs to stop for a different reason.

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Greatist

Wrigley stopped selling its caffeinated gum, Alert Energy, after the FDA raised concerns about added caffeine.

Wrigley's new caffeinated gum, Alert Energy Gum, only lasted a couple of weeks on the shelves of supermarkets, grocery stores and convenient stores after the FDA became concerned about the amount of caffeine each piece of gum offered.

With 40 milligrams of caffeine (equal to half a cup of coffee) in each piece, it's no shock as to why the FDA was concerned, especially because we live in a world where energy drinks and coffee thrive. Although other gum companies have released their own caffeinated items, like Mentos's Up2U Gum and Jolt's energy gum, the FDA has become recently concerned with the amount of added caffeine in foods and drinks.

In fact, the main worry the FDA has about caffeinated beverages and foods is that most of the products are marketed to children, who shouldn't be consuming energy drinks and coffee throughout the day. The FDA's limit for caffeine consumed each day is 400 milligrams, the equivalent of four or five cups of coffee. This limit is set for adults, but the FDA discourages the consumption of caffeine or caffeinated items by children and youths.

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Panera Bread

You won't see this healthy egg white bowl with roasted turkey on the main menu board.

Secret menus at some of our favorite fast food, quick-service restaurants like Burger King, Sonic, Chipotle and McDonald's are not so secret anymore, and now you can add Panera Bread to that list. Like most secret menus go, the items off the menu are usually unhealthy, loaded with calories/carbs/fat and are deemed too good to be on the menu. However, Panera Bread's "hidden menu" isn't filled with giant sandwiches loaded with calorie- and carb-heavy ingredients, or an overly cheesy pasta dish; the Panera Bread secret menu is filled with power-food items with fewer calories than most items on the main menu.

Rather than indulging in a carb-heavy bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, customers can order a power-breakfast egg white bowl with roasted turkey, spinach, roasted peppers and basil pesto, all for just 190 calories; a blueberry bagel racks in at 340 calories. The other hidden breakfast menu item is another power-breakfast bowl with two eggs, top sirloin, avocado and tomatoes for 270 calories.

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Photos by Molly Dunn

McDonald's new Egg White Delight McMuffin is a good healthy breakfast option.

In an effort to lighten up its menu, McDonald's offers new breakfast sandwiches made with egg whites. With its new motto -- "Turning breakfast on its head" -- McDonald's has reduced the calories in various breakfast options by employing egg whites instead of eggs and white cheddar cheese instead of American.

The chain has lightened up breakfast items from its Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit to its Sausage, Egg and Cheese McGriddle -- and even the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes. I decided to try out the new Egg White Delight McMuffin in comparison to the ever-favorite original Egg McMuffin to see if saving 50 calories, five grams of fat and 235 mg of cholesterol is worth it.

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Photo by Barbara Rich

Do you dare to eat a peach?

We all know that we should thoroughly wash our fruits and vegetables after buying them from the grocery store or farmers market. That doesn't mean there isn't still pesticide residue left on the produce items, however.

According to nonprofit advocacy agency Environmental Working Group, a lot of the most commonly consumed fruits and vegetables still contain a large amount of pesticide residue. If you want to avoid most of these pesticides, buying organic is the way to go, especially for the ones ranked highest on the list. Here are the top five fruits and vegetables that made the EWG's Dirty Dozen list and Clean 15 List found in their Shopper's Guide to Pesticide in Produce.

Let's start with the bad news first.

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One chicken, three ways -- with a bonus at the end.

"Cheap and cheerful" is a phrase I picked up while traveling in northern England, used to refer to a quick, inexpensive and tasty meal. I immediately pocked the phrase, loving the connotation that cheap meals don't have to be depressingly awful (i.e., most fast food and frozen dinners).

One of my favorite cheap and cheerful methods of cooking at home is to buy a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store and stretch it into three meals that can easily feed two people. The roasted birds are typically between $5 and $7 each, depending on your local supermarket, and easily pair up with fresh produce and healthy side items that are equally inexpensive.

Here's how I make one rotisserie chicken feed two people for breakfast, lunch and dinner:

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Photos by Katharine Shilcutt

Step one: Ease them into it with a side of excessively decadent pasta.

Maybe it's the contrarian in me -- the endless debater who loves a good, healthy, productive argument -- but there are few things that bring me more pleasure in this world than finding a food someone claims to hate and then finding or making an amazing dish with that food, turning that hate into love.

If someone tells me he doesn't like apples, I make it my mission to find an apple varietal he'll like. If a wine drinker tells me she doesn't like beer, I give her a Flemish sour and watch her horizons expand. If a cautious eater tells me he will never try blood sausage, I send him to eat a creamy piece of morcilla at Pampa Grill and beam as another offal convert is created.

This doesn't always work, of course, but my favorite people are those who'll at least give a "hated" food a handful of tries before giving up entirely. And then a couple more times a few years later...just to make sure. This is how I came to love beets after loathing them throughout my childhood. Now, the sweet, earthy root vegetable is my most treasured food.

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Photo courtesy of sunbeltfoodservice.com

Chick-fil-A will offer three new salads starting April 29.

To be honest, I enjoy a Chargrilled Chicken Garden Salad from Chick-fil-A more than a
Chick-fil-A sandwich. Not only do I get the fix of eating Chick-fil-A chicken, but I feel good
about myself because it's chargrilled, so I can actually eat something healthy at a fast-food
chain. If I am still being honest, though, I do love the Chick-N-Strips Salad -- even if it has
twice as many calories as the chargrilled version. And to be even more honest, I am eating a Chargrilled Chicken Garden Salad while I write this post.

Unfortunately, Chick-fil-A recently announced the removal of all four salads -- Chargrilled
& Fruit Salad, Chick-N-Strips Salad, Southwest Chargrilled Salad and the Chargrilled
Chicken Garden Salad -- to replace them with three supposedly healthier salads and the
addition of one low-calorie Grilled Cool Chicken Wrap.

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Photos by Christina Uticone

Burger King -- healthified.

"Being lazy" and "eating healthy" do not exactly go together like peanut butter and jelly. So imagine my excitement when I saw Burger King advertising both a turkey and a veggie burger. Huzzah! I can exert zero effort and enjoy healthy-ish fast food? Sounds too good to be true!*

I'm not one of those "grumble, grumble, burgers are beef!" people. I enjoy veggie and turkey burgers and order them often in restaurants. (Natachee's makes a mean version of both, and if you haven't tried the house veggie burger at McGonigel's Mucky Duck, you are really missing out.) So I didn't mind skipping over BK's new Chipotle Whopper, or their new Bacon Cheddar stuffed burger, to give these other two ("healthy!") options a whirl.

I think we all see where this is going.

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kisocci

Regular milk, not artificially sweetened milk, comes from these cows.

Let's face it -- kids are not consuming enough milk today. Most children would rather drink sugary juice or a soda rather than a glass of milk. The reason for these choices can be attributed to the fact that kids like foods with lots of sugar -- one ingredient that plain milk does not have.

Unfortunately, when kids do drink milk, it's not the ordinary white milk -- it's the artificially colored and flavored chocolate or strawberry milk. And, sadly, most children probably believe there are cows that make chocolate and strawberry milk.

One serving of chocolate milk has four teaspoons of sugar. Might as well give a child a soda for breakfast. Rather than encouraging and serving kids regular milk without added sugar, parents might start giving their kids flavored milk sweetened with aspartame, an artificial sweetener. But adding aspartame as a means to lower the amount of sugar in milk is not the healthiest or safest option for children.

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