Phil dishes out this week's food news with topics such as: low-fat fried foods, anti-oxidants helping with the aging process, pediatricians claiming that apple juice is good for children, and much more.

Do most Americans want four patties, four slices of cheese and four strips of bacon on a burger?

Absolutely, say the food pushers spokespeople for U.S. restaurant chains.

Fast food usually means fried, mass-produced, unhealthy fare, laden with trans fat and high-fructose corn syrup. But what if you could pick up a quick bite that’s nutritious, organic, reasonably priced, sustainably produced – and tasty, too?

That’s what Fred Marken is providing at Grilla Bites, a small but growing chain of restaurants with two outlets in the Northern California college town of Chico, and two more a few hours north in Ashland and Medford, Oregon. The company’s mission: “to support our environment and community while maintaining a healthy responsibility to our customers through the food we serve.”

Instead of a Big Mac, you can order an Organic Soy Burger or a Wild Salmon Burger topped with grilled onions, tomato, spinach, and aioli. Forget Egg McMuffins; stop in at Grilla Bites some morning for a Grilla Breakfast Burrito, two poached eggs or tofu scramble with black beans, brown rice, and cheddar cheese, wrapped in a flour tortilla or a corn-cilantro crepe. The food comes mostly from local farms, including Marken’s own 100-acre asparagus farm south of Ashland, Oregon.

Though the chain has only four restaurants, (the first location opened in Chico in December 2002; the most recent opened in Ashland in May 2006) Marken, 64, hopes to spread the gospel of healthy, sustainable eating throughout the Northwest and beyond. He recently shared his business plans and thoughts about food in an interview with LIME.

As the debate rages on about whether illegal immigrants do our country more harm or good, one question rarely gets asked; with so many Mexicans living in the U.S., legally or not, why is it so hard to find good, authentic Mexican food?

Author Dagoberto Gilb, who often contemplates Chicano culture, laments the proliferation of lousy, pseudo south-of-the-border-inspired fast food that is no more representative of true Mexican cuisine than the Olive Garden is authentically Italian.

Bigger isn’t better for corporate America these days; an increase in significantly overweight employees is costing companies more than the obvious expenses of obesity-related health problems.

According to a Harvard Medical School study, “obese employees consistently have higher absentee rates, show a higher likelihood of workplace accidents and a lower level of productivity.”

Chipotle’s a restaurant chain, but there's little to link it to the conventional fast food joints this country's used to, if you don't count the fact that McDonald's is their biggest backer. Besides, hasn't McDonald's proven to be pretty progressive in some ways? They deep-sixed the styrofoam packaging, took a pass on genetically modified potatoes, and partnered with Paul Newman to upgrade their salad dressings.

Sorry, South Beach diet, it’s over. You were just an aberration for the Fast Food Nation.

Sales of burgers, fries, and doughnuts are soaring, according to Business Week. Fried chicken’s selling so well that KFC’s even thinking about spelling out its name again.

Americans are back on the junk food bandwagon in denial or defiance of all the warnings about high fat diets. But are the fast food outlets really to blame?

Morgan Spurlock morphed in one month from lean and vital to lethargic and doughy with his all-McDonald’s-all-the-time-diet in “Super Size Me.”

Now comes “Portion Size Me,” a documentary from James Painter, professor at the School of Family and Consumer Sciences at Eastern Illinois University, who makes the case that the true culprit is oversized portions.

A new study from Cornell University backs up Professor Painter’s claims. Researchers found that “large portions of food push people to overeat—even to overeat foods they don’t like.”

In the study, moviegoers were given medium and large buckets of stale popcorn. Those with the big buckets ate 34% more than participants with medium buckets, even though the popcorn was two weeks old.

Evidently, if you serve it, they will eat. And eat. And eat.