Flickr/Eurofruit, Asiafruit & Americafruit

POM pomegranate juices

POM Wonderful pomegranate juice is made from the Wonderful variety of the fruit, but that doesn't make it some wonder drug.

The Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission have had enough of the company making medical claims such as that its products help reduce cholesterol, aid with erectile dysfunction, treat prostate cancer and limit the severity of colds. (In addition to POM Wonderful juice, the company sells POMx pills and liquid extract.)

On Jan. 16, the FTC upheld a judge's earlier decision against POM Wonderful, finding that the juice maker's advertisements mislead consumers about its products' health benefits, BloombergBusinessweek reports.

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Courtesy POM Wonderful

POM's line of products

First the Federal Trade Commission took on those butt-shaping shoes that were supposed to help you get a Kim Kardashian derriere, now a federal judge has upheld a complaint by the FTC that the healthful claims surrounding POM Wonderful juice products are deceptively unsubstantiated.

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Flickr/Joelk75

They're calling it "honey laundering." More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores is filtered to the point where it contains no pollen -- which would make it flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's food safety agencies, according to testing done by Food Safety News.

The Food and Drug Administration says that any product that's been so ultra-filtered that it no longer contains pollen isn't honey. However, the FDA does not check honey sold here to see if it contains pollen. The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether honey came from legitimate and safe sources.

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Guzzle & Nosh

Sea bass at a fish market.

Maybe the latest crime show spinoff ought to be CSI: Seafood. More than one-fifth of the nearly 200 pieces of seafood bought at retail stores and restaurants in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut weren't what they claimed to be, according to an investigation in the December issue of Consumer Reports.

To verify the identities, an outside lab used DNA testing method similar to the genetic fingerprinting that criminal investigators use. The results revealed that the fresh and frozen samples were sometimes mislabeled as a different fish species, incompletely labeled or misidentified by employees.

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Flickr/jrmyst

Jesus doesn't worry about a C

Yesterday the LAPD and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LACDPH) sent out a news release warning restaurateurs of a potential scam targeting local restaurants. Both organizations say they've received numerous calls from restaurant owners saying that they've been contacted by people claiming to be health inspectors. These callers ask for personal information -- like employees' phone numbers -- claiming that they need such information for future visits, and are then provide a time for that inspection. But no so-called inspectors show up. Of course they don't.

The LAPD and LACDPH are advising restaurant owners and managers to be aware of how to identify real health inspectors, and to call the LACDPH if they've been contacted by someone claiming to be a heath inspector. Don't give out any information: get some from them instead. The 6 pointers from the news release are after the jump, including three emphasizing that inspectors may not be paid for good grades. That's Yelp, remember?

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