It seems like the holidays bring out some more unique flavors in our food. If you roam the aisles in the store right now you’ll easily find a pumpkin spice flavored version of many things, while others have released their limited edition peppermint or gingerbread flavors, too. While cookies and coffees make sense, we’re seeing these holiday flavors in some extraordinary places.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises of the holiday flavor rage is coming from Pringles, the potato chip company. For the 2012 holiday season you can find the tubes of chips in a Cinnamon and Sugar, White Chocolate Peppermint, or a Pumpkin Pie Spice flavor. Once you pop we hope you’ll be able to stop – a serving of 16 chips in the cinnamon and sugar or white chocolate flavors match the nutrition facts for their original with 150 calories, 9 grams of fat, and 2 grams of sugar.

Since those chips will probably leave you thirsty, why not wash them down with a Jones Soda? Every year the soda company releases the wildest holiday flavors. While nothing may ever top their Turkey and Gravy flavor that was first released in 1994, the annual sodas are typically a huge hit. This year the sodas are Gingerbread, Pear Tree, Candy Cane, and Sugar Plum. While we couldn’t find nutritionals for these seasonal flavors, we imagine it can’t be too far off the traditional options. A Jones Soda cream soda has 190 very empty calories and a shocking 48 grams of sugar!
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The most recent goal Jennifer had in her weight loss journey was to get down to the weight printed on her driver’s license. In the past month, she accomplished that. She’s now three pounds under her license weight and says “I really need to go get a new driver’s license.”

She’s doing a lot of things right in her weight loss, which we’ve been following since summer. For one, she’s not on a diet. She’s establishing healthy habits that are helping her achieve one goal at a time (which is one of the healthiest habits of all when losing weight). Setting small, manageable goals helps you enjoy achievement all along the way, rather than feeling like you’re pursuing something that, for many, will takes months and even years to achieve.

Since the start of her journey in February of this year, Jennifer is down a total of 44 pounds, currently weighing in at 257 pounds. She’s down from a size 26 to a size 22 and has bought a few new clothes. She admits to still ordering things online, but is pleased with how they definitely fit when they arrive.

She’s also celebrating what she called a breakthrough this past month. “I did spiderman planks!,” Jennifer bragged. “It’s a big deal to me!” She talked about not being able to do them at all before and now she can hold one for 20 seconds.
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As we all head to the polls to cast our votes for president today, you should know you’ve been watched. Our actions have been reviewed and categorized by marketing analysts to the point that they say they can predict your vote based on your consumer behavior. Something as insignificant as a tweet about your favorite soda has been documented and analyzed and that affinity for a certain brand has you pegged Republican or Democrat.

If you’re a Diet Dr. Pepper drinker, you’re probably going to vote for Mitt Romney today. If you are a Pepsi drinker, your vote is likely for Barack Obama today. These statistics and so many more have been collected through a task that is called micro-targeting. Tarun Wadhwa reported in The Huffington Post that it became apparent in 2000 that only seven percent of voters were being reached by traditional ads. Something more effective needed to take place, and this is what lead to micro-targeting.

Since our lives are lived so publicly today, thanks to online activity, ads can be delivered to a potential voter based on their personal traits. To accomplish an accurate understanding of voters, tons of facts have been uncovered. As the facts were analyzed, separated, and charted, it became eerily accurate.
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Unless you follow a very strict natural diet, chances are, you ingest dozens of food preservatives every day. While the FDA must approve a food additive before it is available to consumers, that does not mean it is beneficial or even harmless to consume. Here’s some of the worst ones that should be avoided as much as possible:

1. Brominated Vegetable Oil

Find it in: Flame Retardants and Citrus Soda Pop

Food Products it’s in: Mountain Dew, Squirt, Fanta Orange, Fresca Original Citrus, Gatorade Thirst Quencher Orange, and other citrus-flavored soft drinks and sports drinks

What it is: This ingredient, made from soybeans or corn, is used as a flame retardant by chemical companies, but its purpose in soft drinks is to stabilize the citrus oils from floating to the surface, giving the drink a cloudy appearance.

How it can make you sick: Brominated vegetable oil is banned for use in food in Europe and Japan. The problem is that it builds up in the body and can cause neurological and reproductive problems and skin lesions. Cases of bromine intoxication in humans have caused headaches, fatigue, memory loss, ulcers, and a loss of muscle coordination. These patients ingested much greater than average amounts of soda, but with the popularity of soft drinks like Mountain Dew among many teenagers and video gamers, illnesses are a plausible risk.
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Beverages are one of the major culprits in the battle of the bulge. Most are high in calories, low in nutrition, and do nothing but add to your waistline. However, many of us love our sweet drinks, especially soda and diet soda. And the leader in these fizzy beverages, Coca-Cola, just launched a new calculator to help those who love their sweet drinks learn how they can burn them off.

Coca-Cola Britain just introduced the “Work It Out Calculator.” Users can access the online calorie calculator to effectively burn off a favorite Coca-Cola drink. By simply choosing a drink, like a classic Coke for example, the user can see that a can has 139 calories. Then, the user can see all the various activities they could do to burn off those 139 calories, like 32 minutes of Pilates or yoga, 36 minutes of cycling, or 17 minutes of Zumba. The 137 calories in a can of Dr. Pepper would require spinning for 14 minutes, doing Zumba for 17 minutes, or yoga for 31 minutes.

The calculator does this for all Coca-Cola products as well as provides additional information about energy expenditure and calorie burning. The calculator looks to be an easy to use tool and perhaps an effective one, but how realistic it that for the typical soda drinker? Will people who drink full-sugar soda actually stop and track their intake and then proceed to burn off their drinks before the day is over? We’re not sure Coca-Cola and calorie burning have much in common.
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