New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been trying to get his citizens to live healthier lives (and consume less soda) so he’s probably not overly pleased about a new fast food branding heading to the Big Apple: the 60-year-old California-based Fatburger chain.

NYC already has 627 burger places, the New York Daily News reports, but Fatburger’s owners think they’ve got something special enough to separate them from the Shake Shacks, SmashBurgers, Five Guys, Steak 'n Shakes, and other burger-meisters.

Fatburger makes its sandwiches to order and serves up five different sizes, from a 2.5 ounce small to a monstrous, three-patty 24-ounce XXXL that’ll cost you about 2,000 calories (and more if you add on bacon, chili, and guacamole). Gothamist also notes that the “onion rings are ‘made from real onions’ and the shakes are hand-scooped.

So don’t expect Bloomberg to show up for the ribbon-cutting when Fatburger lands in Manhattan in the spring. Fatburger plans to open 10 lcoations across NYC in partnership with The Riese Organization, which operates more than 75 restaurants in NYC, including franchises for KFC, Pizza Hut, and TGIFridays.Continue reading...

Chef Paula Deen found herself as the target of plenty of criticism earlier this year when she outed herself as a diabetic after having pushed the mega buttery and highly caloric food via her Food Channel show. Her three-year secret didn’t just slip out, of course. It instead came as she announced that she was the news spokesperson for diabetes-drug maker Novo Nordisk.

She told Al Roker when the news came out that she wasn’t going to change the way she cooks, but she’s apparently changed her mind about that since she and her two sons have teamed up with Novo to create and promote the website Diabetes in a New Light, which provides recipes and tips to help adults with Type-2 Diabetes. “You know, I still enjoy my favorite holiday foods, but I've changed the way my plate looks,” Deen told the Philadelphia Sun. “I've been doublin' up on my greens and cutting back on the sodium and carbs. I've also added some of the diabetes-friendly recipes that we've made for Diabetes in a New Light to my holiday menu, and now my whole family will enjoy them too!”

Not into celeb chefs? No problem, Novo is covering its spokesperson bases. The Danish pharma company has just signed hip-hop demigod Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons, the cofounder of Run-DMC.Continue reading...

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg isn’t the only leader of a major city who is trying to get his constituents to be a little healthier. After all, the United States Conference of Mayors shelled out some bucks back in 2009 to produce an online guide to help its members fight childhood obesity. 

But the fight isn’t limited to just America. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is targeting the fast-food joints in his city to get a bit healthier. Johnson apparently isn’t happy with his legacy being only about that he was the guy who happened to be at the helm when the Olympics came to town. 

Nope. Johnson is ready to follow in Bloomberg’s footsteps. Back in June, when Bloomberg announced that he wanted to limit the amount of soda New Yorkers could buy in one cup, Johnson wrote, "where New York leads, London is not far behind,” the Standard reports. Now he’s making his move. The Mayor’s London Food Board partnered with the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health to create a Takeaways Toolkit in an attempt to help “fast food takeaways … make their food healthier,” according to Fresh Business Thinking.Continue reading...

Pepsi has launched its latest specialty cola for Japan, Pepsi Special, which claims to not only block fat but help you lose weight. Below, check out the TV campaign that features women portraying unhealthy temptations — a slice of pizza and a giant hamburger — along with an ABC News segment on the launch.Continue reading...

Japanese lab rats have paved the way for a new wave of sodas. Back in 2006, Japan’s National Institute of Health and Nutrition found that rodents that were fed dextrin and fat simultaneously absorbed less of the fat into their system than the rats that were given fat without dextrin.

Welcome to your new dextrin-rich diet, Japan! Earlier this year brewer Kirin released a Mets Cola beverage, which contains dextrin, onto the market, selling it as a soda that would keep consumers from packing on too much fat. It sold well enough that PepsiCo and Suntory, the sole bottler and distributor of Pepsi products in Japan, are jumping into the fat-blocking cola fray on Nov. 13 with Pepsi Special. As the Huffington Post notes, the “Japanese government certifies these colas as ‘food for specific health use.’”

Pepsi has long experimented with novel flavor combinations in Japan (case in point: yogurt, watermelon or strawberry/milk flavored cola, anyone?) In fact, in December it's also introducing a new clear cola called Pepsi White in time for the holidays with seasonally cute snowmen. Despite being clear, ABC News reports that it's tangerine-flavored. And that's not the only limited-edition variation PepsiCo is rolling out internationally.Continue reading...

New York City's ban on selling beverages bigger than 16 ounces that passed last month doesn't seem to face a major threat as it heads toward implementation in March. It's fat from popular with many New Yorkers, and the beverage industry and others certainly hate it, but the regulation has begun to assume the momentum of inevitability.

That's why the American Beverage Association, which represents Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Dr Pepper Snapple Group among other companies, has launched a last-ditch effort that now includes a lawsuit against the city that the organization, as promised. The suit argues that the unelected New York health board, which approved the ban spearheaded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, shouldn't be telling people how much soda to drink, according to CBS Radio. The suit also said that the rule "burdens consumers and unfairly harms small businesses."Continue reading...

When Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly faced off Saturday in a mock debate, the topic of whether the government should decide what size soda consumers should drink was brought up and summarily dismissed, but there are plenty of other folks — like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — who aren’t letting the issue go.

The just-passed law that Bloomberg pushed to help keep New Yorkers healthy by making it illegal to sell sodas larger than 16 oz. in many New York establishments will go into effect on March 12. And Bloomberg isn’t alone. A soda-tax measure was put on the ballot in Richmond, California, that would discourage consumers from drinking soda and collect money through a soda tax “for neighborhood gardens, recreation and other youth projects that would help fight childhood obesity,” BeyondChron.com reports.

Sick of being called a bad guy in the war against obesity, the American Beverage Association (and the soda giants it represents) today launched a "Calories Count" vending machine program that will start being distributed in the new year. The ABA's new initiative will help consumers identify lower-calorie sodas in vending machines by placing soda calorie counts right on the buttons of vending machines.Continue reading...

Does your child's face light up when you mention the possibility of visiting a fast-food establishment for dinner? Well, apparently, their brain does, too. 

According to new research of MRI scans of children’s appetite and pleasure centers in their brains, the logos of such fast-food giants as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Burger King causes those areas to “light up,” according to research by University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Kansas Medical Center as cited by London's The Independent.

Logos that aren’t food-related did not elicit the same response from the 10- to 14-year-olds involved in the study. Researchers fear that the marketers have “tapped into the 'reward' areas of the brain which develop before youngsters learn self-control,” the paper notes.

The research project will be published in the Oxford journal Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN), which notes in its abstract: "Branding and advertising have a powerful effect on both familiarity and preference for products, yet no neuroimaging studies have examined neural response to logos in children."

“Research has shown children are more likely to choose those foods with familiar logos,” commented study leader, psychologist Dr. Amanda Bruce, whose B.R.A.I.N. Lab (short for Behavioral Rewards And Incentives Network) conducted the Pediatric fMRI Logo Study. “That is concerning because the majority of foods marketed to children are unhealthy.”Continue reading...