Vegetarians and fish eaters are getting a 6% discount on life insurance premiums by Animal Friends Insurance. The company's managing director told The Guardian that "The risk of vegetarians suffering from some cancers is reduced by up to 40% and from heart disease by up to 30%, but despite this they have to pay the same life insurance premiums as meat eaters. We believe this is unfair and the life insurance industry needs to acknowledge the fact that being a vegetarian can have a very positive impact on life expectancy and reduce premiums accordingly."

An unhealthy alcoholic, junk-food addicted meat eating reporter for the UK's Daily Mail tried going vegan for one month -- a kind of "Supersize Me" experiment in reverse. Despite the fact that he cheated a little, leaned toward unhealthy processed vegan foods, kept on drinking alcohol and didn't exercise, his health was transformed in just one month. He lost weight. His cholesterol dropped by 23 percent, started sleeping better and feels much better. His experiment had nothing to do with the new documentary, Raw for 30 Days.

The farm bill, in which every five years Congress pays billions to subsidize the most unhealthy foods and give them an advantage over healthy foods, is getting a lot more attention this year. "We have adopted this high-calorie, low nutrition diet," said Daniel Imhoff, author of "Food Fight: A Citizen's Guide to the Food and Farm Bill." "Maybe advertising is part of it. Maybe TV is part of it. Maybe it's our sedentary lifestyle. But you can't ignore that these subsidies make cheap the ingredients for the refined and processed food industry." One of many interesting tidbits about all this -- The farm bill gives more money to landowners who aren't farming their land than it does to farmers growing foods to be sold as fresh fruits and vegetables.

A food coloring called Red 2G, used to color hamburger meat and breakfast sausages, has been found by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to cause cancer by disrupting the genetic materials of cells.

A 10-year study found that levels of the flavonoids quercetin and kaempferol were between 79 and 97 per cent higher in organic tomatoes compared with conventionally grown -- that's almost twice the antioxidants.

The American College of Nutrition has found that vegetables were healthier in the 1950s than today. The decline in the nutritional value of common vegetables is due largely to the development of crop strains that provide higher and ever higher yields. The short-term solution: Buy as much of your produce as possible at farmer's markets -- or grow it yourself.