On a typical Valentine’s Day, consumers buy more than 58 million pounds of chocolate. Since 70 percent of that chocolate is owned by two companies, Hershey and Mars, most of it was actually processed from genetically modified (GM) corn and soybeans.

In fact, an estimated 90 percent of processed food in grocery stores use GM corn and soybeans patented by agriculture giant Monsanto Company. That includes chocolates, which contain soy lecithin and high fructose corn syrup — a sweetener that’s been tied to the obesity epidemic.

Milk chocolate is also likely to contain milk from cows injected with Monsanto’s hormone rBGH, which was banned in the European Union, Japan, Australia, and Canada because of the risks associated with increased hormones in cows and humans. The hormone was approved in the US when a Monsanto employee, Margaret Miller, oversaw a report on rBGH’s safety, took a job at the FDA, and promptly approved her own report.

Though there is no conclusive evidence a box of GM chocolate will endanger your loved one’s health, the ubiquity of GM corn is still cause for concern. GMOs were marketed in the 1990s as a way to cut down on toxic pesticides, as the plants themselves were modified to repel pests and weeds. But a new crop of studies show these GM seeds are giving rise to evolved weeds and pests with beefed-up tolerance for pesticides. Farmers then have little choice but to apply heavier doses of even more toxic chemicals in an arms race with nature.

The GM corn and soy takeover has also helped Monsanto run hundreds of farmers out of business. Monsanto has won more than $23 million by suing small farmers accused of violating Monsanto’s patent by saving seeds for the next harvest. Monsanto dedicates formidable resources — 75 staffers and $10 million a year — to the sole purpose of investigating and prosecuting these farmers. The vast majority of these lawsuits end in settlements, and Monsanto has won every case that does go to trial. But for the first time, the Supreme Court may intervene in this vicious cycle when they take up the case of a soybean farmer sued by Monsanto next week.

The processed chocolate industry, meanwhile, has worked hard to obscure the true cost of their products. Hershey, Nestle, and Mars were among the companies that campaigned to defeat a GM-labeling initiative in California last year. Together, opponents of Proposition 37 spent $46 million against GM labeling, with Hershey, Nestle, and Mars alone dropping nearly $400,000 in one month. Despite the initiative’s defeat, labeling has the support of 91 percent of Americans and it is already a requirement in Europe.

So chocolate lovers don’t despair, Grist has a guide for buying more ethical chocolate.

Thirty-year-old New Zealand mother of eight Natasha Harris was not a casual Coca-Cola drinker: She drank more than two gallons of the soda per day, taking in more than 11 times the recommended daily sugar consumption and twice the recommended amount of caffeine in what her family calls an addiction, complete with withdrawal symptoms. And according to the coroner investigating her death by cardiac arrest, that addiction contributed to her death:

“I find that, when all of the available evidence is considered, were it not for the consumption of very large quantities of Coke by Natasha Harris, it is unlikely that she would have died when she died and how she died.”

The coroner’s report revealed Harris suffered from a variety of health problems possibly connected to her Coke problem, including a racing heart and “absent teeth.” Coca-Cola Oceania issued a statement condemning the report yesterday:

“The Coroner acknowledged that he could not be certain what caused Ms Harris’ heart attack. Therefore we are disappointed that the Coroner has chosen to focus on the combination of Ms Harris’ excessive consumption of Coca-Cola, together with other health and lifestyle factors, as the probable cause of her death. This is contrary to the evidence that showed the experts could not agree on the most likely cause.”

While Harris’s soda consumption was clearly well outside the norm, research has connected the consumption of sugary drinks like soda to health concerns, particularly obesity. Children in the U.S. consume 7 trillion calories of these drinks per year, and studies show that the least healthy of those products are aggressively marketed to children of color who have been hit hardest by the obesity epidemic.

That marketing works so well that Coca-Cola has launched PR campaigns to divert attention from its role in that epidemic. The food and beverage industry touts “personal responsibility” messaging to emphasize that it’s simply up to people to make healthy choices and consume their products in moderation, as opposed to Harris. But health experts warn that those industries’ misleading marketing tactics mimic Big Tobacco’s.

As part of a voluntary public health initiative led by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) to lower the amount of sodium in popular foods, 21 companies — including Butterball, Heinz, Subway, Starbucks, and Kraft Foods — have cut salt content in certain products by as much as 30 percent.

As CBS News reports, the affected products include a variety of foods including hot dogs, cold cuts, cheese singles, sandwiches, and crackers. Bloomberg lauded Kraft in particular for “reducing sodium in its Kraft Singles American Slices by 18 percent” and Subway for eliminating sodium entirely from two of their popular sandwiches.

Bloomberg and public health advocates welcomed the companies’ decisions, noting that Americans consume an excessive amount of sodium, and that the source of the excess is in pre-packaged foods rather than salt manually added to products by consumers:

“These companies have demonstrated their commitment to removing excess sodium from their products and to working with public health authorities toward a shared goal — helping their customers lead longer, healthier lives,” said Bloomberg.

Noting that Americans eat about twice as much salt as they should and citing its link to high blood pressure and resulting diseases, the city set voluntary guidelines in 2010 through the National Salt Reduction Initiative for various restaurant and store-bought foods. Bloomberg said that 80 percent of salt came from prepackaged foods, not people adding salt.

“Consumers can always add salt to food, but they can’t take it out,” NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said at the time.

Bloomberg has established himself as a leader in battling America’s obesity, diabetes, and smoking-related public health epidemics, enforcing strong public smoking bans and limits on soda sizes in his city.

While some critics have labeled his methods as overbearing, some of the evidence vindicates Bloomberg’s tactics, as cities with stronger nutritional regulatory regimes tend to be healthier and less obese — particularly children in such cities. And the companies’ decisions to voluntarily lower salt content is a welcome change from the tendency of Big Food to market heavily processed products, thereby undermining public health.

Curbing obesity rates in the United States would go a long way toward reducing health care costs and improving general wellness among Americans. Other recent efforts aimed at addressing obesity and public health include initiatives to promote healthy school lunches and Obamacare provisions requiring chain restaurants to conspicuously post caloric information on their menus.

The powerful companies in the food, drink, and alcohol industries — defined as “unhealthy commodity” companies — are circumventing public health policies by employing the same tactics that Big Tobacco uses, health experts reported on Tuesday. After analyzing the multinational businesses’ marketing strategies, researchers concluded the industry needs tighter outside regulation to prevent it from driving the global epidemic of chronic diseases.

Even though the public health community has attempted to cooperate with “unhealthy commodity” companies, the researchers say that efforts to encourage these industries to self-regulate are failing. Instead, the companies are consolidating power by building financial connections with health agencies and non-governmental organizations — and using that power to lobby politicians to oppose health reforms, much like Big Tobacco exerted control over Washington in the 1950s and 60s:

The researchers said that through the aggressive marketing of ultra-processed food and drink, multinational companies were now major drivers of the world’s growing epidemic of chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

Writing in The Lancet medical journal, the researchers cited industry documents they said revealed how companies seek to shape health legislation and avoid regulation. [...]

They cited analysis of published research which found systematic bias from industry funding: articles sponsored exclusively by food and drinks companies were between four and eight times more likely to have conclusions that favored the companies than those not sponsored by them.

The researchers — an international team comprised of health experts from countries like Australia, Britian, and Brazil — recommended that food, drinks and tobacco corporations shouldn’t be allowed to have any role in influencing national or international policies on chronic diseases.

This isn’t the first time that comparisons have been drawn between Big Tobacco and Big Food — particularly since both industries’ marketing tactics rely on “personal responsibility” arguments that claim additional regulation isn’t necessary because it’s simply up to American consumers to make healthy choices. Tobacco brands and food companies have also both attempted to avoid scrutiny by repositioning themselves as socially responsible corporations, launching “public health” campaigns and rolling out “safer” products to give the impression that they’re already doing enough to work toward public health goals.

Of course, while it’s possible to eliminate tobacco from society, it’s not possible to eliminate the food or beverage industries — but Dr. David Katz, the co-founder of the Yale Prevention Research Center, explains the parallels are still undeniable. “Frankly we need to learn from the mistakes we made in public health with tobacco. We believed the half measures taken by the companies for far too long,” he told ABC News. “We do want food corporate citizenship. But the bad behavior deserves to be called out.”

The meat industry uses a considerable amount of antibiotics to fight bacteria on its livestock farms — so much so that it actually far outpaces the amount of antibiotics used to treat sick people in the country. According to FDA data compiled by Pew Charitable Trusts, the livestock industry is consuming almost four-fifths of the total amount of antibiotics used in the U.S.:

And, as Mother Jones points out, that points to a dangerous trend in the meat industry. As livestock in close quarters breed bacteria, and the industry uses more and more antibiotics to contain those pathogens, common bacteria are developing a resistance to drugs. For example, more than 75 percent of the salmonella found on ground turkey in 2011 was resistant to at least one antibiotic used to treat it — and over half were resistant to three or more different antibiotics. Unless the meat industry changes its practices, the FDA will have a difficult time continuing to ensure that meat products are safe to consume.

And even though Americans are consuming considerably fewer antibiotics than the meat industry, antibiotic resistance isn’t just an issue among lifestock farms. Diseases that affect humans — such as whooping cough, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea — are also growing increasingly resistant to the drugs used to treat them. Since testing and marketing new antibiotics isn’t as profitable for the pharmaceutical industry as selling the drugs that are already on the market, production has lagged behind over the past few decades, and global health officials warn that an impending “antibiotic apocalypse” could make even the most common infections incurable.

Gatorade will stop putting brominated vegetable oil (BVO), a synthetic chemical that is used as a flame retardant, into its products after a barrage of complaints, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Although the company has reportedly been considering removing BVO from its beverages for some time now, it was spurred to act after receiving overwhelming pressure from consumers regarding the potentially harmful chemical, including a popular Change.org petition that was initiated by 15-year-old Sarah Kavanagh:

A recent petition on Change.org to drop the chemical – which has more than 200,000 supporters – did not inspire the decision, Carter said, though she acknowledged that consumer feedback was the main impetus.

In the petition, posted by Sarah Kavanagh of Hattiesburg, Miss., “BVO” is described as banned in Japan and the European Union.

The effort quotes a Scientific American article suggesting that “BVO could be building up in human tissues” and that studies on mice have shown “reproductive and behavioral problems” linked to large doses of the chemical.

BVO is used to “distribute Gatorade’s coloring throughout the bottle” equally. The Times also reports that, while Gatorade will stop including BVO in newly produced drinks, there are no plans to recall products already on the market.

High fructose corn syrup, the central ingredient in most sweetened drinks and processed foods, is on the decline. According to a new 2013 projection by the US Department of Agriculture, the amount of corn used to produce the sweetener will drop to its lowest level in 15 years.

This latest data is part of a steady decline in the sweetener’s popularity. Americans consumed an average of 131 calories of high fructose corn syrup every day in 2011, a 16 percent drop since 2007. At the same time, consumption of soft drinks, the main vehicle for the corn syrup, dropped 21 percent from 1998 to 2011.

High fructose corn syrup is linked to type 2 diabetes and obesity. Several cities have launched anti-obesity campaigns that may be partially responsible for public opinion turning against the sweetener. Another factor may be the rising cost of corn in recent years; high fructose corn syrup has been heavily subsidized by American taxpayers, keeping production costs artificially low:

For decades, corn syrup benefited from the relatively low cost of corn compared with sugar. A tripling of corn costs since 2004 has lessened that advantage, while consumer obesity concerns and negative publicity have also eaten into demand, said Lauren Bandy, an ingredients analyst with Euromonitor International in London. [...]

The sweetener industry often contests that high fructose corn syrup is being unfairly demonized while traditional cane sugar is overlooked. But according to USDA statistics, Americans aren’t replacing high fructose corn syrup with sugar to satisfy their sweet tooth. Though sugar intake has risen 8.8 percent since 2007, total sweetener production is still down 14 percent since 1999.

High fructose corn syrup producers have worked hard to alter their image, even requesting the USDA change the product’s name to “corn sugar.” As the diabetes and obesity epidemics are particularly prevalent among minority and low-income communities, the sugary drink industry has aggressively targeted their marketing to black and Latino children. But as this latest USDA data indicates, the industry may be losing ground against minority-heavy cities that are gradually lowering their obesity rates via robust anti-obesity policies and campaigns.

Black youth are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to take in large quantities of their daily calories from sugary drinks, according to a new study examining American beverage consumption. Low-income children of all racial backgrounds also tend to drink almost twice as many sugary beverages as wealthier Americans do.

Considering the fact that sugar-filled drinks have been conclusively linked to an increased risk for obesity, the study’s results reveal some of the racial and economic disparities within the nation’s obesity epidemic. “Some groups may be more at risk for soda, others may be more at risk for fruit drinks, all of which … have the same sugar base that contributes to obesity and disease,” one of the study’s co-authors, health policy researcher Lisa Powell, explained.

This particular study didn’t try to figure out why that’s the case, although Powell did suggest to Reuters that “cultural norms” and cost could both be factors. But other studies have examined the links between race, class, and nutrition — and research has confirmed that access to healthy food is divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. Even aside from cost barriers, lower-income Americans tend to live in neighborhoods that lack healthy, high-quality food in nearby grocery stores, and they often struggle to access the transportation they need to go grocery shopping. The fast food industry also contributes to nutrition disparities by targeting its marketing to low-income communities.

It’s not clear whether the soda industry is also disproportionately targeting low-income or minority groups, but it wouldn’t be the first beverage sector to try. Alcohol advertising has been proven to particularly target black youth, even despite the fact that African-American teens tend to drink less alcohol than youths from other racial groups.