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Tracking Your Fruits and Veggies

Sure, you've heard that "5 a day" is the minimum number of fruits and vegetables you should eat to promote good health. But how do you keep track of all these foods and where they fit in your lifestyle? With the "5-a-day calculator." At 5aday.nci.nih.gov, you fill in the average number of fruits and vegetables you've eaten every day over the last six months, and you include the average number of minutes spent daily on exercise. Add in the answers to four more questions about diet and exercise and presto! Your own personal tracking chart shows where you are and where you should be regarding a healthy lifestyle. The site also has recipes and tips on how to eat more nutritious foods and boost physical activity. The National Cancer Institute and the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention run the site.

Something Fishy About This Site

Selecting fish for dinner can be a daunting process. There are so many possibilities. If you decide on, say, snapper, should you choose Gray, Lane, Pacific, Caribbean Red, Silk, or Yellowtail? What's the difference? And how do you know that what the store calls snapper is really snapper? FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition has helped take some of the guesswork out of seafood shopping at www.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/rfe0.html. High-resolution photos and descriptions of 96 fish types, as well as photos of marketed forms such as fillets and steaks, are all part of the center's on-line Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia. Developed to help regulatory officials, seafood marketers, and consumers identify fraudulent fish substitutions and inferior products, the encyclopedia also serves nicely as a crash course in the family of fish.

Preventing the Worst Ears of Your Life

Thirty million Americans are exposed to dangerous levels of noise daily, and 10 million have already suffered irreversible hearing damage, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). Much of this exposure and damage can be prevented, and you can find out how on the "Wise Ears!" Website at www.nih.gov/nidcd/health/wise/coalition.htm. Helpful pages include a fact sheet on how we hear and how hearing loss is caused by noise. You'll also find pages on "How Loud Is Too Loud," which matches noise levels with common sounds that can be harmful, and "Ten Ways to Recognize Hearing Loss." NIDCD operates the site in cooperation with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

What Are the Latest Drug Products?

With new drug treatments coming on the market all the time, it can be hard to keep up with just what the newest approved products are. By going to www.fda.gov/cder/approval/, you can get a heads up with an alphabetical listing of drugs FDA has approved over the last two years. The list gives the manufacturer, date of approval, and, in many cases, a description of how the drug is intended to be used. One note: Some of the newer approved products may not yet be available.

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