The real reason for health claims is well established: health claims sell food products.

What we know about diets hasn't changed. It still makes sense to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, balance calories from other foods, and keep calories under control. That, however, does not make front-page news.

Consumers have to understand that the purpose of these claims is to get them to buy the product.

Nutrition science, however, suggests that golden rice alone will not greatly diminish vitamin A defi-ciency and associated blindness. [”¦] People whose diets lack [fats and proteins] or who have intestinal diarrheal diseases -- common in develop-ing countries -- cannot obtain vitamin A from golden rice.

Once the Government Accountability Office did a review of food safety systems in other countries and found many things about those food safety systems that were better than ours [American].

Restaurants that have health-conscious consumers will pay attention to this.

It's a tremendous way of getting people to buy more at lower cost to the producer. There's no question that that's an incentive to buy. Everybody loves a bargain.

FDA, which regulates the safety of vegetables, doesn't have those kinds of rules because Congress doesn't want it to. It's not that the vegetables themselves have anything wrong with them it's that they're contaminated with animal manure. One of the rationales for a single food safety agency is that you can't separate animals from vegetables.

If we have a food supply that we can't trust, that has enormous implications for the way we view government, for the way we trust business, and for our international trade relations.

If you're sick, first you have to associate your sickness with a food. Then you have to report it to your doctor. Then the doctor reports it to some state authority. The state authority reports it to the federal authority. By the time all that happens, two weeks have gone by.

Fat is mainstream, which is why everyone has become complacent. What used to be considered pudgy before isn't even worthy of a comment today.

These days the biggest issue is how many calories you consume. So all of this stuff distracts people from thinking about calories.

The chef has kids complaining to their parents the food they get in school is better than what they get at home. He's turned this group of kids into curious, adventurous eaters.

One can only be in awe of the creativity of chocolate marketers. My take is that if there is a health benefit, it is small.

BASICS OF DIET AND HEALTH The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. For additional clarification, a five-word modifier helps: go easy on junk foods.

Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition: at a time when hundreds of millions of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese.

It's a completely reasonable diet -- heavy on fruits and vegetables and fresh, seasonal foods. I'm totally for it. It's common sense in a nice package.