Eliza Barclay

To Olympians, food is fuel, and mileage may vary. Depending on their sport, contenders need to consume anywhere between 1,200 to 8,000 calories before competing.

These days, it can be hard to ignore all the messages to eat less meat and more vegetables.

Last year, the World Health Organization used its megaphone to publicize the link between cancer and excessive red meat consumption.

Environmentalists push the message, too, by pointing to all the ...

#NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the #NPRreads hashtag. Each weekend, we highlight some of the best stories.

From political reporter Sam Sanders:

Writing ...

Which beer goes with guacamole? And which brew adds a nice clean, crisp finish to spicy wings?

Those are burning questions for anyone who wants to take his snack game to the next level this Super Bowl weekend. And two craft beer experts who wrote the book on pairing have ...

Two blue-gloved hands grip a scalpel and slowly, methodically peel the label off a mandarin orange and pierce the fruit's skin — separating pith from flesh with cool deliberation. One week later, the hand and the scalpel are back to carefully extricate the center of a Reese's peanut butter cup ...

Why is it that we haven't seen ads for cigarettes on television since the Nixon administration?

Because public health officials said the ads caused people to smoke more and raised their risk of getting cancer. And because Nixon stood up to the tobacco industry to sign legislation banning the ...

Chef's Garden is a farm in Ohio growing vegetables to the specifications of the world's top chefs. It's a place where vegetables are artistic materials painstakingly tended and handled like jewels.

Eating healthfully in America is hard. We have to contend with constant sugary and oily temptations, while pervasive ads coax us to eat these items day in and out.

The public health community generally agrees that regulations and taxes could help remind us of the potential health toll of the ...

Every year some 2 million Americans get infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and 23,000 of them die from these superbugs.

Superbugs are mostly a hospital problem: They're where these pathogens are often born and spread, and where the infected come for help. But hospitals are not where the majority of antibiotics ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is beating the drum again: We're consuming too much sodium and it's a reason we have such high rates of hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

Not me, you say? Well, chances are, yes, you.

An analysis appearing in this week's Morbidity and Mortality ...

Animal welfare advocates got major traction this year pushing for cage-free eggs.

In September, McDonald's pledged it would move to 100-percent cage-free eggs in its supply chain. And while the movement was already underway, this announcement seemed to really set off a domino effect.

Some of the biggest egg ...

From big food companies simplifying ingredients, to the U.S. government's new goal to reduce food waste, to a public image crisis for Chipotle, 2015 has been a big year for food.

Tour the produce section of a modern grocery store and you may conclude that we live in an age of unprecedented variety and abundance.

Indeed, it's never been easier to experience exotic fruit flavors like durian, dragon fruit or lychee and find staple fruits like blueberries and oranges pretty ...

The procedure is rapidly going mainstream, but it's so new that it's impossible to know if these women will exercise their option to have a child. Also, live birth rates from frozen eggs remain low.

It's a tantalizing idea, isn't it, that we could burn stored fat simply by nibbling or sipping on something that tastes good.

Plenty of companies are now capitalizing on the allure of "metabolism boosting" foods and drinks. Among the most-hyped substance is green tea — for its supposed powers as ...

Earlier this month, I reported on a test for women who are exploring egg freezing as an option to preserve their fertility for the future.

My story looked at how the fertility industry uses the test to help guide patients in making a major life decision like egg freezing, ...

Ever wondered how a few companies — namely Coca-Cola and PesiCo — created multibillion-dollar empires marketing flavored sugar water?

Nutrition scholar Marion Nestle, one of the most dogged chroniclers of the U.S. food industry and its politics, did. She was intrigued by the power of Big Soda and how ...

If you've consumed coconut oil or coconut meat lately, there's a reasonable chance it was imported from Thailand. And if it was, there's an even better chance the farmer who grew that coconut had a monkey fetch it from a tall tree.

Thailand has been raising and training pigtailed ...

Public health advocates have argued that one of the best ways to fight obesity would be to tax the sugary drinks that science has implicated as a big part of the problem.

While many states and cities have tried to find ways to tax sodas and other sugar-sweetened beverages, ...