San Francisco’s public attorney has filed a lawsuit against Monster Beverage, the maker of the popular Monster energy drinks, over concerns that the company is targeting its potentially-dangerous products to children as young as six years old in its advertising campaigns. Energy products like Monster have been coming under increasing scrutiny recently as reports of their adverse health consequences have been on the rise.

The lawsuit is the latest skirmish in a battle that began when the parents of a 14-year-old girl with pre-existing heart conditions — who died after consuming several cans of the product in a 24-hour period — sued the company towards the end of last year. That prompted San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera to open negotiations with the drink maker in an effort to persuade them to use safer ingredients. Herrera claims that the talks were occurring in “good faith” — until Monster suddenly sued him last week over his product change demands, which Monster argues that only the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has the authority to make. Now, Herrera is suing the manufacturer under the auspices of a California marketing and public health law, noting that Monster’s website “uses children as young as six years old to promote its brand.”

There have been at least five deaths and one heart attack potentially linked to Monster products since 2004. In fact, as energy products have grown in popularity, the number of energy drink-related emergency room visits ballooned to a staggering 20,000 between 2007 and 2011 — a two-fold increase in just four years. That’s led congressional leaders and FDA officials to focus attention on an industry that has, until now, largely been spared scrutiny over public safety concerns. Monster recently responded to this pressure by relabeling its products as “drinks” rather than “dietary supplements,” a move that frees it from its responsibility to report incidences of its products’ adverse public health requirements.

However, that same decision may end opening up Monster to more robust federal oversight. “Food” products must contain ingredients that are “generally recognized as safe” — something that critics argue do not fit the description of little-known caffeine-like substances used in Monster drinks such as taurine. The FDA recently announced that it would ramp up investigations into energy-enhanced food and drink products in the wake of health risk concerns and the emergence new concoctions such as Wrigley’s new “Alert” energy gum — each stick of which has as much caffeine as half a cup of coffee.

Over 50 San Francisco-based restaurant owners are under fire for prioritizing their own profits over their workers’ health care coverage. A city-wide investigation revealed that, after the restaurant industry collected a total of $14 million in worker health care surcharges in 2011, just a third of that money actually went toward providing low-wage workers with insurance.

Under a city-wide requirement, businesses in San Francisco are supposed to set aside some extra money — about $2 dollars an hour for each worker — to help their employees afford their insurance costs. When the rule first went into effect in 2008, some restaurant owners avoided raising the prices on their menu by tacking a surcharge onto the bottom of their bills and explaining to their customers that the fee would help fund workers’ health care.

But according to San Francisco Supervisor David Campos and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who helped conduct the investigation into the restaurant owners’ practices, those customers were being deceived. “I can’t say all of them, but for some of these restaurants it was a marketing ploy,” Campos said. And that marketing ploy came at the direct expense of their workers, some of whom didn’t have health insurance at all:

In some cases, not only did the surcharge money go back into owners’ pockets, but employees were denied health care altogether, Ammiano and Campos said.

The inconsistencies were caught after the health law was amended in 2011, requiring city audits of the surcharges. Last year, 3,652 restaurants turned in their paperwork to the labor office, which found oddities in the accounting. The documentation was then turned over to the city attorney for a full-fledged investigation. [...]

For Campos, it’s a consumer-trust issue. “These diners thought they were paying for workers’ health care. Instead these owners were gaming the system,” he said.

Low-wage workers like the employees in San Francisco’s restaurant industry typically don’t have access to health insurance — in fact, more than half of low-wage workers at small firms were uninsured in 2010. And workers’ health care costs are continuing to rise while their wages are stagnating, so it’s nearly impossible for them to afford their own insurance on the private market if their employers choose to deny them health coverage.

Obamacare will help address some of these issues in a similar way as San Francisco began doing in 2008. Starting in 2014, the health reform law will help ensure that employers can’t deny their workers health care simply to protect their own profits, and require businesses with more than 50 employees to offer basic health benefits. Nonetheless, profitable members of the restaurant industry like Olive Garden, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s are already using Obamacare as a convenient excuse to keep perpetrating their anti-worker labor practices and avoid giving their workers any benefits.

Although so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) often present themselves as valid alternatives to women’s health clinics, they actually serve as a tool for anti-abortion advocates to talk women out of getting abortions, often using misleading information and conservative propaganda to shame women into making a different choice for their bodies. In San Francisco, however, a judge has confirmed that crisis pregnancy centers will no longer be able to use deceptive advertising to take advantage of vulnerable pregnant women.

After San Francisco city officials proposed an ordinance to crack down on CPCs’ false advertising — for example, signs telling women who are seeking abortions that they can receive counseling, medical care, and emotional support at a crisis pregnancy center — a local CPC sued. The anti-abortion organization First Resort alleged their civil rights were in danger of being violated by the overly vague law, which they claimed might be applied more broadly to restrict more than just their advertisements. Jezebel reports that this week, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong dismissed the legal challenge to the city’s ordinance, ruling that First Resort should understand exactly what the law is intending to do:

First Resort claimed that statements regulated by the ordinance are not expressly limited to advertising and therefore the ordinance could apply “to virtually any speech made by First Resort, including statements made to its financial supporters for fundraising purposes.”

Armstrong noted that First Resort “ignored” provisions that state the purpose of the ordinance is to prevent false and misleading advertising regarding services and counseling provided or not provided and that any center cited under the ordinance would get a chance to cure the “false, misleading or deceptive advertising.”

The judge ruled that a “person of common intelligence could discern that the conduct proscribed by the ordinance is false and misleading advertising, and not simply any statement made by the limited services pregnancy center.”

San Francisco is not the first city to attempt to prevent CPCs from spreading misinformation, but it is the first to succeed. Laws attempting to regulate CPCs have been struck down in other cities like Baltimore and New York City. And in many parts of the country, crisis pregnancy centers have powerful allies in elected officials. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) has said he hopes to defund Planned Parenthood clinics in his state and replace them with crisis pregnancy centers that don’t provide the same health services.