junk food

The average Costa Rican adult consumes twice the recommended value of salt each day, according to the Health Ministry.

Officials from Costa Rica’s Social Security System on Tuesday reported the agency will allocate just over ₡3 trillion ($5.5 billion) of its budget for covering public health care expenses and pension payments in 2016.

Health and happiness really do go together in Costa Rica. The country recently topped another list — this time, of the region's healthiest countries.

Agriculture Ministry officials this week began a nationwide survey on the population's consumption of vegetables, fish and seafood.

A recent study found that one fast food kid's meal in Costa Rica had six times more sodium than the same meal from the same restaurant chain in the U.K.

"Honey is thought of as more natural whereas white sugar and high fructose corn syrup are processed from the cane or the beet or the corn," said Raatz, whose paper appears in the Journal of Nutrition. "We wanted to find out if they were different. But chemically, they are very, very similar, and that's what it seems to break down to."