Have you had your break today? Well, according to last week s judicial ruling in San Francisco, it seems that McDonald s has, as will parents who want to make their own decisions about their kids food choices. Last year, the famous food chain was the target of a class-action lawsuit filed by the notorious food-nanny group, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

Some pundits concerned about health conditions linked to dietary excess are proposing draconian fixes. The problem, though, is that these drastic fixes are broken to start with. Perhaps most wrong-headed of all is the argument made for regulating the consumption of foods with added sugars as though they were cigarettes or alcoholic beverages. Sin taxes, age restrictions, food stamp limitations: as with alcohol and tobacco, so with added sugar, goes the logic.

Although not nearly as well-known as AIDS, hepatitis C affects about 200 million people worldwide about four times the number of HIV cases. In the U.S. alone, about 4 million people are infected. Hepatitis C, which is usually transmitted through contact with infected blood, causes a slow but progressive deterioration of liver function, leading to cirrhosis and sometimes liver cancer. There were no satisfactory therapies for the infection until last year, when Merck and Vertex each launched a protease inhibitor-type drug an anti-viral analogous to those used successfully in taming HIV.

Cancer therapies have come a long way in recent years, and for many, a cancer diagnosis is no longer a death sentence. In fact, a new study, presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting this week, indicates that about half of cancer survivors will end up dying from a disease other than cancer.

A commonly used class of antibiotics called fluroquinolones may raise a patient s risk of retinal detachment, suggests a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. These drugs, which include ciprofloxacin (Cipro) and levofloxacin (Levaquin), have previously been known to cause damage to connective tissue and to cartilage.

While it s long been clear that there are strong genetic components to autism, it has remained, for the most part, a mystery as to what exactly these genetic components might be. And with new numbers showing that one in every 88 American children will be diagnosed with autism, it has become an even more urgent priority to identify the causes of this condition.

For over a decade, the American consumer has been bombarded with ads lauding the supposed beneficial health effects of dozens of antioxidants. A typical claim is that these compounds protect against free radicals that may be responsible for causing cancer or that they prevent cellular damage and thereby slow the aging process. Many of these claims have become popularly accepted without question. And as ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava notes, Since many of these supposed miracle compounds are vitamins, people assume that loading up on them won t hurt even if they re not effective antioxidants.

Paging all doctors: A new set of guidelines, devised by a team of nine specialists plucked from eight separate medical specialty boards, recommends that physicians less frequently perform certain common procedures and prescribe some expensive medicines less often; it also advises patients to question the necessity of some of the tests they are offered.

While we ve long advised that moderate alcohol consumption provides a protective benefit against heart disease, a recent study has found that having one to two drinks daily may also decrease mortality rates among heart attack survivors.

According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while only about 10 percent of Americans suffer from any nutritional deficiency, nearly one in ten women between the ages of 12 and 50 have low iron levels, and many others have such low iodine levels that they border on deficiency.