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Washington boy finds whiskey in Mountain Dew A 13-year-old in Shoreline said he took a swig of his Mountain Dew and it turned out to be whiskey. His parents say the bottle was sealed and looked legit. “Except for the color it looks like a fully functional Mountain Dew,” said Marie Grant, mother. Marcus Olson immediately spit it out. “It tasted a little bitter. It didn’t taste like Mountain Dew at all,” he said. His mother said her son drank at least a shot. Grant is furious. She claims she’s only getting the run around from both Pepsi and the...

New York City's health board has passed a rule banning super-sized, sugary drinks at restaurants, concession stands and other eateries. The regulation passed Thursday puts a 16-ounce size limit on cups and bottles of non-diet soda, sweetened teas and other calorie-packed beverages. The ban will apply in fast-food joints, movie houses and Broadway theaters, workplace cafeterias and most other places selling prepared food. It doesn't cover supermarkets or most convenience stores. City health officials say the ban is necessary to combat a deadly obesity epidemic. The restaurant and beverage industries have assailed the plan as misguided. They say the city's...

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 12 (HealthDay News) -- New York City's controversial proposal to regulate restaurant sales of large sugary drinks is coming to a head, with the city's Board of Health scheduled to decide the measure's fate on Thursday. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's self-appointed board is expected to pass the measure, effectively prohibiting city restaurants, delis, sports facilities, and street vendors (but not grocery stores or convenience stores) from selling sweetened beverages in servings exceeding 16 ounces. The mayor has framed the issue as an urgent public health effort to combat obesity, saying the goal is to help New Yorkers make better...

Is 16.9 oz. the perfect size? Who knows? We willingly submit to the unforgiving judgment of the market.As a fellow entrepreneur with a public-service orientation, I have been a longtime admirer of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to acting on his principles. Having launched Honest Tea 14 years ago with five thermoses and a belief that consumers were thirsty for a lower-calorie natural and organic beverage, I appreciate all he has accomplished. However, I write today as an entrepreneur frustrated by a proposal that arbitrarily complicates the practical realities of commerce. When the mayor announced his proposal to...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - America's largest physician organization recommended on Wednesday that taxes levied on sugar-sweetened sodas be used to fight the country's growing obesity crisis. But the policy statement adopted by the American Medical Association's House of Delegates meeting in Chicago fell short of outright support for taxing sugar-sweetened beverages to control use of these products. Two recommendations to support such taxes put before the group's policy-making body in prior meetings failed to pass. "While there is no silver bullet that will alone reverse the meteoric rise of obesity, there are many things we can do to fight this epidemic...

Call it a case of “Pepsi Envy.” The far-left kookocracy that rules Cambridge (motto: “Too small for a Republic, too large for a permanent ‘Occupy’ encampment”) saw the unrelenting mockery of New York City’s proposed “big-soda” ban and said, “Hey, that could be us!” And so they leapt at the opportunity to play national punch line yet again, pushing their own version of Nanny Bloomberg’s Big Gulp ban. If the story of Massachusetts were made into a movie, Cambridge would be played by Pauly Shore. And even he’d be embarrassed by it. Embarrassed because even in this attempt at self-humiliation,...

Policy Order Resolution O-4 ORIGINAL ORDER IN CITY COUNCIL June 18, 2012 MAYOR DAVIS WHEREAS: High intake of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages increases the risk of obesity and diabetes; and WHEREAS: New York City has a plan to limit the serving size of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages sold in restaurants; now therefore be it ORDERED: That the City Manager be and hereby is requested to refer the matter of a ban on soda and sugar-sweetened beverages in restaurants to the Cambridge Public Health Department for a recommendation.

aking a cue from New York City's proposed ban on sugary drinks, one Massachusetts town is looking to pass a similar crackdown to combat obesity and diabetes. Residents of Cambridge may have to sacrifice larger portions of soft drinks in its battle of the bulge, nearly a month after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made national headlines with his own proposal. Cambridge Mayor Henrietta Davis submitted the proposal at a city council meeting on Monday night.

Like I said a few weeks ago, this was always the goal of the otherwise dumb soda regs. A restriction on portion sizes makes no sense when it's limited to one kind of beverage and a select few types of vendors except as a way to inure the public to more draconian regulations down the line. Ban big sodas now, let people get used to it, and then if/when the city's obesity rate dips --- for whatever reason(s) --- flog the hell out of those statistics as proof that dietary nannyism works and should be pursued more aggressively. No surprise,...

The basic case against New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest crusade, to outlaw the sale of extra- large sugared soft drinks, is Libertarianism 101: In a free country, people should have the right to do what they want, even if it’s bad for them. The major exceptions and complications to this basic principle don’t seem to apply. Unlike secondhand smoke, my consumption of a Pepsi does no direct harm to anyone else. Unlike marijuana, sugary drinks have a perfectly adequate and legal substitute: sugar-free drinks. (Even if you can tell the difference between Coke and Diet Coke, you can’t claim...

Remember when Rolling Stone was cool? Yeah, me neither. But it was once a center of rock ‘n roll rebellion and fighting the system. Now it’s a just another creature of the system. On MSNBC today, RS executive editor Eric Bates came out in favor of a federal ban on large soda sizes. Sounding like a leftist spin doctor, Bates characterized the ban as a “regulation on harmful substances that people take into their bodies, and which cost the government millions and millions of dollars a year in obesity and diabetes.” Others on the panel, which came at the end...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to take away big sodas from New Yorkers. He wants restaurants, movie theaters and sports stadiums to be prohibited from selling sodas or other sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces. "All we are trying to do with full sugar drinks is to give people encouragement to do things in moderation," the mayor said on Sunday. What do New Yorkers say? "Fuhgetaboutit." "I really don't think that's like a great thing to do. People got to make up their own mind," says one New Yorker. "I think it's ridiculous. I think he should let people live as...

ALBANY — The New York Police Department, the mayor and the city’s top prosecutors on Monday endorsed a proposal to decriminalize the open possession of small amounts of marijuana, giving an unexpected lift to an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to cut down on the number of people arrested as a result of police stops...

the accident happened when the 18-wheeler rolled over and lost its trailer near Riverside Drive on the northbound side of the highway just before noon. The truck was carrying a load of soft drink cans, which spilled all over the road.

A follow up to this post...

www.FinancialSurvivalNetwork.com presents: Our favorite whipping boy Little Brother aka Nanny Bloomberg, formally known as Michael Bloomberg, is at it once again. Nanny Bloomberg wants to ban sugary drinks that are sold in containers larger than 16 ounces. As usual he knows better than you, and he wants you to retain your boyish or girlish figure. But don't be too upset, you can still get that 1,000 calorie milk shake from Mickey D's and as of yet refills don't seem to be on his radar. These out of control, wannabe dictators must stay up nights thinking up these looney ideas. There's...

Several weeks ago, as further information and discovery came to the surface the whole framing of the original media narrative began to crumble, I stumbled over a reference to “DXM” in Trayvon’s Facebook history. It’s nagged at me since, at various times popping to the front of my mind when Trayvon’s drug use was mentioned, was quickly lost to other distractions. A couple of evenings ago it again came to the forefront of consideration. This time I decided to dig in, do a little research, and see if there might actually be something to it. What I found was frankly,...

Thanks to byzantine SF permitting processes, it took Juliet Pries almost two years to open the Ice Cream Bar in Cole Valley, the subject of this week's restaurant review. But the delay gave her time to change the focus of the shop, expanding from ice cream into its most distinctive feature: pre-Prohibition sodas. I talked to Pries last week just before filing my review: SFoodie: So how did the Ice Cream Bar come about? Pries: Well, it's a long story. I had been in the bar business (as part-owner of the Kezar Pub in the Haight), but did pastry before....

In this week's Appetite food and drink column in the paper, I relished the opportunity to return to a time of delicious handmade fountain drinks at Cole Valley's new Ice Cream Bar (albeit with some innovative contemporary flavor twists). In between sips of wild cherry phosphate, I got to talk to Russell Davis, the bartender who developed the fantastic soda fountain program, about the soda jerk revival -- and got him to share some of his sassafras secrets. SFBG Why is Ice Cream Bar different from other soda fountain revival spots in the US? Russell Davis There are a few...

LYNN — Police arrested a woman at a Lynn Stop & Shop Saturday after she allegedly stole $64 worth of soda cans from the store and attempted to feed them into a digital can return machine in exchange for money, according to a Lynn Police incident report. According to the report, Officer Craig Fountain was watching loss prevention video while on detail at the grocery store, located at 35 Washington St., around 8:45 p.m. when he observed 36-year-old Tina Cafarelli purchase 18 12-packs of assorted soda and pay with a state-issued electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card, which she allegedly also...