THE | DIET DETECTIVE^®

Let's all get together and huddle around the buffet - it's the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl has become much more than a football game. It's an eating event, just like Thanksgiving. Super Bowl Sunday with friends and family is now the second biggest day for food consumption in the United States after Thanksgiving.  Discover the true costs of those game-day treats by learning how much time you will have to spend in your favorite Super Bowl activities to burn off all those foods.* What follows is not meant to ruin your day - just to give you a few tips for choosing the most splurgeworthy foods. And keep in mind that we all have a daily caloric budget, so it is only after you exhaust your daily budget that these exercise equivalents kick in.

Claims on meat and poultry labels are confusing, and trying to determine if they actually have value is even more confusing. After working on this column, I walked into a local supermarket and asked for organic chicken. The butcher handed me a package that said "Free Range" and "Certified Humane," but nothing about its being organic -- yet he insisted it was organic.

The following is designed to help you better determine how the animals you're eating were raised, what they've been fed and how they've been cared for.

I was passing the meat counter in the supermarket the other day, and the butcher was telling one of the customers, with pride, that the market had just started selling chickens that were free-range and had not been given any hormones. Well, that sounded great. Having confidence in the foods we’re about to consume is important. But what do free-range, hormone-free and all those other terms really mean when it comes to meat and poultry? Here’s a guide, as the first of a two-part series.