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Agave nectar is slightly sweeter than honey, but won’t spike your blood sugar.

One telling sign that a career in food was a good fit for me was that I’ve always loved grocery shopping. I can happily spend hours browsing the aisles just to see if I might discover something I haven’t noticed before. Lucky for me, I’m the food editor of EatingWell Magazine and I get to talk with our team of cooks in the EatingWell Test Kitchen about their daily supermarket shopping trips and the new things they’ve noticed during their trips up and down the aisles.

All that shopping and talking helped us come up with this list of trendy foods for 2012. Whether a food has become ubiquitous in the stores, something that’s generating media coverage or simply something that our readers and fans are buzzing about, each of the foods on our list of the top 15 trendy, healthy foods is having a moment.

Read more: Top 15 Healthy, Trendy Foods for 2012

People who consumed a pint daily reduced their risk of heart disease by 31%, a study finds.

For years, wine drinkers have indulged without guilt, reveling in the news that red wine can help protect against heart disease. Recent research shows that beer can also be good for what ails you, from reducing risk for broken bones to helping warding off diabetes and mental decline. It can even increase longevity, a large study suggests.

However, the key to tapping into beer’s benefits is moderation, meaning just one 12-ounce beer per day for women and two for men. Heavy drinking ups the threat of liver damage, some cancers, and heart problems. Bingeing on brewskis can also make you fat, since a 12-ounce regular beer has about 150 calories, while light beer has about 100.

Read more: 10 Surprising Health Benefits of Beer

One man exposes what advertised sandwiches look like next to the same meals in real life.

Have you ever been lured into visiting a fast-food restaurant thanks to an advertisement that showcases a mouthwatering meal you might not otherwise buy, only to be disappointed when the item you bought looks nothing like the item you were marketed? You’re not alone. This fascinating photo project started in late 2010 by Dario D. shows how the real-life items stack up to their advertised images. Terrifying,

Read more: How Fast Food Ads Stack Up to Real Thing

Kale is chock full of vitamin A, and pomegranates are loaded with antioxidants.

When it comes to choosing what to eat, I like to get a lot of nutritional bang for my buck, so to speak. The best deals? “Superfoods” that are far more plentiful in nutrients than they are in calories and that research has shown deliver health benefits. You’re probably already eating a lot of everyday superfoods-like bananas, eggs and broccoli-and maybe even some exotic ones (acai, anyone?).

Read more: 7 of the Healthiest Foods You Should Be Eating but Aren’t

It’s fun being funny! It’s fun to give funny gifts thanks to these funny gift ideas:

Ms Food Face Plate, Food Face Plate, After Dinner Nipples – Rude Food

Now for some funny food facts:

In the 1800′s, people believed that gin could cure stomach problems.

McDonalds calls frequent buyers of their food heavy users.

Rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world’s food supply each year.

The company doesn’t reveal everything people should know about the drink, one U.S. woman claims.

A California woman is suing the maker of Tropicana claiming it is squeezing consumers by touting the best-selling U.S. orange juice as “100% pure and natural” when it is not.

In her federal lawsuit, plaintiff Angelena Lewis said Tropicana Products Inc, knowing consumers “want and demand natural products,” deceives them in its advertising and packaging for its Pure Premium juice, including cartons featuring an orange with a straw stuck into it.

Read more: What’s in that OJ? Tropicana is sued

The long-standing belief that cold water boils the faster is finally put to a definite test.

The fastest way to bring a pot of water to a boil
Many have claimed that a pot of water will come to a boil faster if you start with cold water. This claim, both perplexing and intriguing, required further investigation. In turn, I performed five tests using the same pot and the same burner to see how long it would take for 2 cups of tap water to come to a boil. Here are my results:

Read more: Which boils faster: hot water or cold? We have the answer

Canadians examined whether a mouse left in a can of Mountain Dew will eventually dissolve.

A man in the U.S. is suing Pepsi Co. over a mouse allegedly found in a can of Mountain Dew, a claim the company rejects by saying the acid in the beverage would disintegrate the animal’s body.

However, that reasoning doesn’t hold water with Canadian food experts.

“There would not be enough acid in the matrix of the can to actually start causing those physical changes to the mouse,” says Massimo Marcone, an associate professor of food science at the University of Guelph.

Read more: No easy way to dissolve mouse in Mountain Dew

It’s never easy to stop smoking, but there are some foods that can help you to quit.

One of my close friends is trying to quit smoking for good. I know it’s really hard for her to kick the habit, so I had to pass along this research we ran in EatingWell Magazine that certain foods can help-or hurt-your chances of quitting.
According to a study out of Duke University, these 4 foods make cigarettes taste terrible:

• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Dairy Products
• Noncarbonated beverages, such as water and fruit juice

Read more: 4 Foods to Help You Quit Smoking (and 3 that Make it Harder)

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the health benefits or hazards of diet drinks.

Once and for all, we wanted to know: Can diet soda make you fat? So we went to the SHAPE diet doctor, Mike Roussell, PhD, to get his opinion. Here’s what he had to say:

In a word: no. While drinking diet soda every day isn’t exactly good for your health, the chances of it sabotaging your weight-loss efforts are slim. The common misconception regarding the role of diet soda and weight gain comes from a couple of studies that received a lot of media attention. One such study looked at more 6,500 participants and found that diet soda drinkers were 67 percent more like to have diabetes and 37 percent more likely to have metabolic syndrome (a combo of symptoms that is basically where pre-diabetes meets heart disease). What’s more, data from the Framingham Heart Study, the longest running heart disease study in the US, found a 56-percent increase in metabolic syndrome when people drank one or more diet sodas per day!

Read more: Is Diet Soda Making You Fat?