Bill Gates’ Secret Love for Coca-Cola: Why He’s Always Seen With a Can of Coke
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s wealthiest philanthropists, has an interesting habit that often catches attention during his public appearances: he’s frequently seen with a can of Coca-Cola in hand. While some might see it as just a casual quirk, there’s a deeper connection between Bill Gates and Coca-Cola that explains why he’s often sipping on a Coke during interviews.
Gates’ frequent association with Coca-Cola isn’t just about his personal preference for the beverage — it’s directly tied to a major investment he made in Coca-Cola FEMSA S.A.B. de C.V., the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler.
This Mexican multinational company, headquartered in Mexico City, operates across much of Latin America, with Mexico being its largest and most profitable market. It’s a major player in the Coca-Cola supply chain, managing the bottling and distribution of Coca-Cola beverages across a wide region.
Kennedy Gives Food Company CEOs an Ultimatum
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered a stark ultimatum to major food company CEOs in a closed-door meeting this week: Ban certain artificial dyes from your products or the government will do it for you.
Kennedy on Monday pressed leaders of companies like PepsiCo, General Mills, Tyson Foods, Smucker’s, Kraft Heinz and Kellogg’s for commitments to reduce food additives, according to a readout of the meeting sent to industry stakeholders and viewed by POLITICO. It was the Health and Human Services secretary’s first major meeting with the very executives he’d spent months accusing of making Americans sick.
“[Kennedy] expressed the strong desire and urgent priority of the administration to remove FD&C colors from the food supply — and he wants this done before he leaves office,” wrote Consumer Brands Association President Melissa Hockstad in the readout sent to industry, referring to color additives used in foods, drugs and cosmetics.
“He expects ‘real and transformative’ change by ‘getting the worst ingredients out’ of food,” she added, quoting the secretary.
Health Secretary RFK Jr. Calls for Intensive Testing of Bird Flu Drugs on Poultry
Global Center for Health Security reported:
Therapeutic drugs should be “intensively” tested on U.S. poultry flocks infected with bird flu, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, arguing that the medications could help identify treatments for human cases.
In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity broadcast on Tuesday night, Kennedy said he opposed mass vaccination and culling as a strategy for controlling the H5N1 avian influenza strain. Instead, he advocated for measures to protect flocks from infection by wild birds, isolating infected fowl, and allowing the highly pathogenic virus to spread through poultry to identify birds with natural immunity.
Although critics have long characterized him as a vaccine skeptic, Kennedy encouraged people to get vaccinated in a growing multi-state measles outbreak, saying the shots will be offered free to anyone who wants one. However, he also emphasized the importance of freedom of choice over immunizations, claiming that vaccines cause deaths every year as well as blindness and brain swelling — symptoms caused by measles itself.
Big Farms Breed Big Flu: End the Cage Age for a Healthier, Affordable Path to Food Security
The foundation of good health is simple: Wholesome food, fresh air, physical movement and low stress. Yet, these fundamental principles are absent in modern food production.
Animal factories — industrial-scale factory farm livestock operations — create ideal conditions for the emergence and rapid spread of disease, including avian flu. High-density confinement, genetic uniformity, and poor air quality weaken birds’ immune systems and enable viruses to mutate and transmit quickly.
Unlike in natural settings, where biodiversity and space act as buffers against disease, factory farms concentrate thousands or even millions of animals in close quarters, amplifying viral loads and increasing the risk of spillover to wild birds and even humans.
The industry’s reliance on mass culling, vaccines, and “biosecurity measures” fails to address the root cause of so many food safety and food security crises: an unnatural, high-stress system that prioritizes profit over resilience.
Inside the Government Study Trying to Understand the Health Effects of Ultraprocessed Foods
Sam Srisatta, a 20-year-old Florida college student, spent a month living inside a government hospital here last fall, playing video games and allowing scientists to document every morsel of food that went into his mouth.
From big bowls of salad to platters of meatballs and spaghetti sauce, Srisatta noshed his way through a nutrition study aimed at understanding the health effects of ultraprocessed foods, the controversial fare that now accounts for more than 70% of the U.S. food supply. He allowed The Associated Press to tag along for a day.
“Today my lunch was chicken nuggets, some chips, some ketchup,” said Srisatta, one of three dozen participants paid $5,000 each to devote 28 days of their lives to science. “It was pretty fulfilling.” Examining exactly what made those nuggets so satisfying is the goal of the widely anticipated research led by National Institutes of Health nutrition researcher Kevin Hall.
Feds Give Okay to Pigging out on Lab-Grown Pork With No Pig in It
Can salami eaters tell lab-grown pork butts from fat meat? Or will they react to them as to green eggs and ham, offered by the Dr. Seuss character Sam-I-am: “I do not like it, Sam-I-am! It may be good for pigs and the planet, but I don’t give a damn!”
The San Francisco-based biotech company Mission Barns is betting $60 million in start-up expense that bacon buffs will not know the difference, or will not care, and will conclude, “Say, I like lab-grown ham! I do, I like it, Sam-I-am! Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-am!”
Mission Barns on March 7, 2025 announced that it had received final U.S. Food & Drug Administration approval to allow consumers to pig out, literally, on pork with no pig in it.
The initial consumer offering will not spare many of the 1.5 billion pigs raised and slaughtered every year worldwide, or the 132 million pigs raised and slaughtered per year in the U.S., but the technology could eventually put the whole factory-farmed pork industry out of business — if consumers buy that pork need not be produced in a living pig through a hellacious combination of cruelty with noxious pollution.
“Italian restaurant Fiorella, which has four locations in San Francisco, will serve the products on its menu as part of the launch campaign,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle food and wine reporter Mario Cortez.
Girl Scouts Sued Over Alleged Heavy Metals and Pesticides in Popular Cookies
A new lawsuit alleges cookies sold by the Girl Scouts include “dangerous” heavy metals and pesticides, though the youth organization has denied the claims in defense of its popular product, which draws in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year.
The proposed class action, filed Monday in the Eastern District of New York by a New York resident and other consumers, alleges Girl Scout Cookies are “contaminated with dangerous heavy metals” and pesticides.
The lawsuit — which does not claim anyone was sickened or harmed by the cookies — requests damages of at least $5 million for those who purchased Girl Scout Cookies in the U.S., citing violations of consumer protection laws.
The lawsuit cites a small December 2024 study by GMO Science and Moms Across America, which tested samples of 25 cookies sold in three states and found each contained the pesticide glyphosate, while some contained at least four heavy metals, including aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury.
Lab-Grown Meat: Will Britain Embrace Food Grown in a Bioreactor?
It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but lab grown meat could be on supermarket shelves within two years – with the U.K.’s Food Standards Agency looking at how to speed up its approval process. Lab meat is already on sale for pets, but companies have complained that they are being held back in developing meat for human consumption by excessive red tape.
But before you start imagining petri-dish poultry and test-tube T-bones in Tesco, let’s tackle the big questions: is it safe? Is it healthy? And will it save the planet or is it just another ultra-processed foodstuff?
Upside Foods, one of the leaders in cultivated meat, certainly thinks it has a place in a sustainable food future. “We’re so past the petri dish stage,” says Melissa Musiker, the California-based company’s head of communications. Rather than a sterile, futuristic lab, think more along the lines of an artisanal brewery, but swap out the hipster hops for massive steel bioreactors.
The Future of Food Is Here: Would You Eat a 3D-Printed Steak or a Lab-Grown Burger?
Digital Marketing News reported:
The idea of printing our dinner or growing it in a lab used to sound like science fiction, but here we are — with some companies already rolling out prototypes. It makes sense if you think about how far we’ve come: a decade ago, few imagined that something like a drone-delivered meal would be viable. Now, many of us barely flinch at the concept.
I spent more than a decade working in digital marketing before I made the leap into writing about life choices and human behavior. In that previous career, I saw how rapidly tech innovations can reshape entire industries.
Watching that same level of disruption happen to the food sector is fascinating because it challenges some of our core traditions — how we farm, how we cook and even how we see ourselves as consumers.
Cultured Meat Claims “Overly Ambitious, Not Supported by Evidence” Review Finds
More than 170 companies are now in the race to produce commercially viable, publicly-palatable cultured meat products, attracting more than $4.7 Billion in investments since 2019. The cultured meat industry owes much of its growth to claims it is environmentally beneficial, alleviates animal welfare concerns and is equally as nutritious and acceptable as conventional meat.
However, a newly published study has examined existing research on cultured meat and has found that many of the industry’s claimed sustainability and nutritional benefits “are overly ambitious and not supported by evidence”.
The scientific review, titled Reassessing the sustainability promise of cultured meat: a critical review with new data perspectives, was published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition on Feb. 21.
Montana Lawmakers Propose Outlawing Lab-Grown Meat Products
A proposal to ban lab-grown meat in Montana cleared the House last week and will head to the Senate after this week’s legislative break. House Bill 401, brought by Rep. Braxton Mitchell, R-Columbia Falls, would criminalize the sale of meat grown in a lab. A similar bill passed in Florida last year and an injunction against the law being put in place was denied by a federal judge in the Sunshine State late last year.
Supporters of the bill pointed to the 2.1 million cows being raised for beef in the state and questions around unknown human health effects from consuming lab-grown meat. There were no opponents in the bill’s hearing. “I have some grave concerns over the use and production of lab-grown meat,” Rep. Randyn Gregg, R-White Sulphur Springs, who is co-sponsoring the legislation, said during the hearing. “The process is a fusion of dystopia. One could call it Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ meets Keanu Reeves in ‘The Matrix.’”
The bill has more than 70 co-sponsors, mostly Republican, with a handful of Democrats joining in. The sponsors include much of the Republican Senate and House leadership. The bill passed its third reading to move to the Senate on a 64-35 vote.
