When we see a company like Arnold Bread create this product roster, something else is going on:

100% whole wheat, 12 Grain, 7 Grain, German Dark Wheat, Health Nut, Healthy Multi-grain, Honey Whole Wheat, Oatnut, Country Oat Bran, Country Wheat, Country White, Country Whole Grain White, Healthfull 10 Grain, Healthfull Flax and Fiber, Healthfull Hearty Wheat, Healthy Nutty Grain, Double Fiber, Double Protein, Grains & More Flax and fiber, Triple Health, Dutch Country 100% whole Wheat, Butter Split Top, Extra Fiber, Premium Potato, Premium White, Rye Everything, Rye and Pump, Pumpernickel, Rye Seedless, Melba Thin, Rye with Seeds, Soft Family 100% Whole Wheat, Soft Family Classic White, Soft Family Honey Wheat, Soft Family Whole Grain White, Brick Oven Whole Wheat, Brick Oven Premium White, Premium Italian, Stone Ground, Light 100% Whole Wheat.

By my count, there are 40 kinds of bread, and that is just counting the sliced breads, not the thins or buns. Is there really anyone in this world who loves the Arnold 10-grain, but can’t stand the 7-grain or 12-grain? (…) The motivator here isn’t making the customer happier, it’s the oft-neglected fourth ‘P’ of marketing: placement. Even if the supermarket carries only half the varieties that Arnold offers, all of a sudden they are hogging a big part of the bread aisle.

{ IdeaRocket | Continue reading }

A meta-analysis done by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) into the relationship between alcohol consumption and heart disease provides new insight into the long-held belief that drinking a glass of red wine a day can help protect against heart disease.

“It’s complicated,” says Dr. Juergen Rehm. “While a cardioprotective association between alcohol use and ischaemic heart disease exists, it cannot be assumed for all drinkers, even at low levels of intake,” says Dr. Rehm.

Ischaemic heart disease is a common cause of illness and death in the Western world. Symptoms are angina, heart pain, and heart failure. (…)

“Even one drink a day increases risk of breast cancer, for example,” says Dr. Rehm. “However, with as little as one drink a day, the net effect on mortality is still beneficial. After this, the net risk increases with every drink.”

“If someone binge drinks even once a month, any health benefits from light to moderate drinking disappear.” Binge drinking is defined more than four drinks on one occasion for women, and more than five for men.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Microwave Massacre is a 1983 dark comedy/horror film directed by Wayne Berwick. (…)

After coming home drunk one night and getting into an argument with his wife May, Donald loses his temper and bludgeons her to death with a large pepper grinder. He wakes up the next day with a bad hangover, no memory of the night before, and a growling stomach. He discovers May’s corpse in the microwave and after the initial wave of horror passes, he starts to take it in stride, telling his co-workers that he and May separated. After work, he cuts up May’s body and stores it in foil wrap in the fridge.

Looking for a midnight snack one night, Donald unintentionally takes a few bites of May’s hand, and after the initial wave of horror passes, he realizes it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. He even brings some to work with him and shares it with Phillip and Roosevelt, who concur. He soon starts picking up hookers and using them for meat in his recipes. (…)

Donald’s lunches continue to be a hit with his friends, and he decides to cater an outing to a wrestling match with a new recipe he calls “Peking chick.” When Roosevelt and Phillip show up to pick up Donald, they discover him dead on the floor of a heart attack, and some body parts in the microwave. They leave in horror and disgust, realizing what Donald had been serving them.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Glenn Glasser }

Peter Singer says if there is a range of ways of feeding ourselves, we should choose the way that causes the least unnecessary harm to animals. Most animal rights advocates say this means we should eat plants rather than animals. (…)

Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:

• at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
• more environmental damage, and
• a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.

{ Mike Archer | Continue reading }

related { American Meat Consumption Down 12.2% Since 2007. }

photo { Kelsey Bennett }

Observe your own mood, and that of others, in the context of how recently they have eaten. If there’s a hothead in your circle, notice that his anger is greatest before meals, when hunger is highest, and rarely does he explode during meals or just after. When you feel agitated, try eating some carbs. They’re like a miracle drug. I suspect that anger is evolution’s way of telling you to go kill something so you can eat.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

Coca-Cola was named back in 1885 for its two “medicinal” ingredients: extract of coca leaves and kola nuts. Just how much cocaine was originally in the formulation is hard to determine, but the drink undeniably contained some cocaine in its early days. (…)

Back in 1885 it was far from uncommon to use cocaine in patent medicines (which is what Coca-Cola was originally marketed as) and other medical potions. When it first became general knowledge that cocaine could be harmful, the backroom chemists who comprised Coca-Cola at the time (long before it became the huge company we now know) did everything they could with the technology they had available at the time to remove every trace of cocaine from the beverage.

{ Snopes | Continue reading }

artwork { Robert Rauschenberg, Coca Cola Plan, 1958 }

Is losing weight as simple as doing a 15-minute writing exercise? In a new study published in Psychological Science, women who wrote about their most important values, like close relationships, music, or religion, lost more weight over the next few months than women who did not have that experience.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Given this importance of the flavors we learn to like, it seems to me remarkable, and unfortunate, that most people are unaware that the flavors are due mostly to the sense of smell and that they arise largely from smells we detect when we are breathing out with food in our mouths. (…)

The role of retronasal smell in flavor was finally put on the map by Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, in an article in 1982. As he phrased it, we need to recognize that smell is not a single sense but rather a dual sense, comprising orthonasal (breathing in) and retronasal (breathing out) senses. He devised experiments to show that the perception of the same odor is actually different depend­ing on which sense is being used. Subjects trained to recognize smells by sniffing them had difficulty recognizing them when they were introduced at the back of the mouth.


{ Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters | Continue reading }

There are two different types of alcohol-induced blackout: en bloc, a complete loss of memory for the affected time period; and fragmentary, where bits and pieces of memories remain. The en bloc blackout is more likely to occur when a large quantity of alcohol is ingested within a small time period.

(…)

Alcohol primarily interferes with the ability to form new long–term memories, leaving intact previously established long–term memories and the ability to keep new information active in memory for brief periods. … Blackouts are much more common among social drinkers—including college drinkers—than was previously assumed, and have been found to encompass events ranging from conversations to intercourse. Mechanisms underlying alcohol–induced memory impairments include disruption of activity in the hippocampus, a brain region that plays a central role in the formation of new autobiographical memories.

(…)

Women are more susceptible to alcohol blackouts than men (and recover more slowly) because of their generally less muscular body composition, and gender differences in pharmacokinetics.

{ The Neurocritic | Continue reading }

According to research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, nearly 25 percent of older adults had small pockets of dead brain cells that may have been caused by unnoticed “silent strokes.” (…)

Another study also published by the journal Neurology this week suggested that certain vitamins and a low-trans-fat diet may help preserve memory loss.

The researchers found that trans fat (found in fried and many processed foods) contributed to “more shrinkage of the brain” in addition to less cognitive recognition.

{ Neon Tommy | Continue reading }

Even though chili fruits are popular amongst humans for being hot, they didn’t evolve this character to keep foodies and so-called “chili-heads” happy. Previous research indicates that chilis, Capsicum spp., evolved their characteristic “heat” or pungency as a chemical defence to protect their fruits from fungal infections and from being eaten by herbivores. Chili pungency is created by capsaicinoids, a group of molecules that are produced by the plant and sequestered in its fruits. Capsaicinoids trigger that familiar burning sensation by interacting with a receptor located in pain- and heat-sensing neurons in mammals (including humans).

In contrast, birds lack this specific receptor protein, so their pain- and heat-sensing neurons remain undisturbed by capsaicinoids, which is the reason they eat chili fruits with impunity. Additionally, because birds lack teeth, they don’t damage chili seeds, which pass unharmed through their digestive tracts. For these reasons, wild chili fruits are bright red, a colour that attracts birds, so the plants effectively employ birds to disperse their seeds far and wide.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

Your book starts with the idea, which was very prominent and commonly believed by a large group of people, that fat–eating fat and fat in your diet, particularly animal fat–isn’t good for you and it leads to heart disease. How did that come to be accepted wisdom in the medical profession?

First, let me say I think it’s still commonly believed by most people, and the latest dietary guidelines are trying to get us to limit our fat intake, and limit our saturated fat intake. This is an hypothesis that grew out of the observations of one very zealous University of Minnesota nutritionist in the 1950s, a fellow named Ancel Keys, who came up with this idea that dietary fat raised cholesterol, and it was raised cholesterol that caused heart disease. At the time there was effectively no meaningful experimental data to support–I’ll rephrase that: There was no experimental data to support that observation. It seemed plausible, though. It seemed plausible, compelling. Keys was a persuasive fellow. And by 1960 or so, the American Heart Association (AHA) got behind it in part because Keys and a fellow-proponent of this hypothesis, a cardiologist from Chicago named Jeremiah Stamler, got onto the AHA, got involved with an ad hoc committee, and were able to publish a report basically saying we should all cut our fat intake. This was 1961. Like I said, no data to support it; no experimental data at all. And once the AHA got behind it, it got a kind of believability. The attitude was: It’s probably right, and all we have to do is test it. Or, we’re going to believe it’s true, but we don’t have the data yet because we haven’t done the tests yet.

And researchers start doing the tests, experimental trials, taking a population. For instance, a famous study at the VA hospital in Los Angeles, where you randomize half of them to a cholesterol-lowering diet which is not actually low in fat, by the way–it’s low in saturated fat and high in polyunsaturated fat. And then the other half of your subjects eat a control diet and you look for heart disease over a number of years and see what happens. And trial after trial was sort of unable to prove the hypothesis true. But the more we studied it, the more people simply believed it must be true. And meanwhile, the AHA is pushing it; other observations are being compiled to support it even though in order to support it you have to ignore the observations that don’t support it. So, you pay attention to the positive evidence, ignore the negative evidence. One Scottish researcher who I interviewed memorably called this “Bing Crosby epidemiology” where you “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.” Basic human nature. But this is what happened. And as the AHA gets behind it, the journalists see the AHA as honest brokers of information on this, so they have no reason to doubt the AHA. And the AHA was honest brokers–they just were bad scientists. Or they were not scientists. So, then the press gets behind it, and as the press gets behind it, politicians begin to think maybe we should do something about it, and a Congressional subcommittee gets involved, run by George McGovern, that had originally been founded in the late 1960s to address hunger in America; and they did a lot of good things with school lunch programs and food stamps. And by the mid-1970s they were running out of things to do, so they decided: Since we’ve been dealing with under-nutrition, which is not enough food, they would get involved with over-nutrition, which is a problem of too much food and obesity and diabetes and heart disease. And they had one day of hearings, McGovern’s subcommittee, and they assign a former labor reporter from the Providence, RI, Journal to write the first dietary goals for the United States–the first document ever from a government body of any kind suggesting that a low fat diet is a healthy diet. And once McGovern comes out with this document, written by a former labor reporter who knew nothing about nutrition and health; now the USDA feels they have to get involved; and you get this kind of cascade or domino effect. To the point that by 1984 the National Institute of Health (NIH) holds a consensus conference saying that we have a consensus of opinion that we should all eat low fat diets, when they still don’t have a single meaningful experiment showing that a low fat diet or cholesterol lowering diet will reduce the risk of heart disease, or at least make you live longer. Because a few of the studies suggested that you could reduce the risk of heart disease but you would increase cancer. And not one study–the biggest study ever done, which was in Minnesota, actually suggested that if you put people on cholesterol-lowering diets you increase mortality; they had more deaths in the intervention group than the control group. (…)

Japanese women in Japan have very low rates of breast cancer. So when Japanese women come to the United States, by the second generation they have rates of breast cancer as high as any other ethnic group, and one possibility is it’s because they come over here and they eat more fat. But the problem with those observational studies, those comparisons, is you don’t know what you are looking at. So, you focus on fat because that’s what your hypothesis is about–and this is an endemic problem in public health–and you just don’t pay attention to anything else. So, sugar consumption is very low in Japan and very high here. So, maybe it’s sugar that’s the cause of heart disease, or the absence of sugar is the reason the Japanese are so relatively healthy; and if you don’t look at sugar, you don’t know.

{ Gary Taubes/EconTalk | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Mapplethorpe }

It’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. (…)

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.

{ Waldo Jaquith | Continue reading }

Hoekstra and Hung (2002) were the first to introduce the concept of the “water footprint” of a nation, which is the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services consumed by the nation’s population.

Therefore, in order to calculate Dutch coffee and tea related water consumption accurately, one must not only include the amount of water used in coffee machines or kettles but also the “virtual water content”, which is the volume of water needed to produce said coffee or tea. (…)

So just how much water goes into the production of a single cup of coffee in the Netherlands? 

Well, the Dutch water footprint was much bigger for coffee than it was for tea because the Dutch consume a lot more coffee than tea and tea has a lower virtual water content than coffee (10.4 cubic metres per kg of tea vs. 20.4 cubic metres per kg of coffee).

If you take into account the 7 grams of roasted coffee that goes on average into making a single cup and that a standard cup of coffee is about 125 ml, you find out that a total of 140 Liters of water goes into making a single cup of coffee in a Dutch household.

Now, the Dutch drink an average 3 cups of coffee a day, which totals to 2.6 billion cubic meters of water being used every year to satisfy the population’s need for caffeine.

{ Salamander Hours | Continue reading }

photo { Loretta Lux }

{ Recipe Networks Reveal Human Taste Preferences | PDF }

Aaron Lefkove was struggling to raise close to $200,000 to open a New England-style clam shack in a Gowanus, Brooklyn, storefront.

Bank loans were out of reach. “We didn’t have the kind of collateral they wanted,” said Mr. Lefkove, a 31-year-old punk rocker and publisher’s copywriter, nostalgic for family visits to Bigelow’s New England Fried Clams in Rockville Centre, N.Y.

“I liquidated my 401(k) and my I.R.A. as well,” Mr. Lefkove said. “I even sold my guitars.”

It wasn’t enough. He and a partner reached out to friends and family and used their own credit cards. Still not enough. “We picked up investors — some became partners, some would get a return, everyone was structured differently,” he said. “Even that was not enough.”

So to help get his restaurant, Littleneck, over the finish line, the next stop was Kickstarter.com — a Web site that solicits donations to finance art, technology and business projects. Promising little more than good karma, some discounts and a T-shirt, he raised $13,000 from 162 donors — $5,000 more than his goal. With the help of a few final investors, the 38-seat restaurant began serving fried clams and lobster rolls last month. (…)

John Fraser used Kickstarter to raise about $24,000 for his short-lived but well-reviewed pop-up restaurant, What Happens When. And the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm in Long Island City, Queens, raised more than $20,000 that way.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Human beings are notoriously terrible at knowing when we’re no longer hungry. Instead of listening to our stomach – a very stretchy container – we rely on all sorts of external cues, from the circumference of the dinner plate to the dining habits of those around us. If the serving size is twice as large (and American serving sizes have grown 40 percent in the last 25 years), we’ll still polish it off. And then we’ll go have dessert.

Consider a clever study done by Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing at Cornell. He used a bottomless bowl of soup – there was a secret tube that kept on refilling the bowl with soup from below – to demonstrate that how much people eat is largely dependent on how much you give them. The group with the bottomless bowl ended up consuming nearly 70 percent more than the group with normal bowls. What’s worse, nobody even noticed that they’d just slurped far more soup than normal.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Annee Olofsson }

Food allergies are weird. Basically, you eat something, it gets broken down, and sometimes the food has proteins in it that the body doesn’t digest. In food allergy sufferers, the immune system will recognize this foreign protein and raise hell about it (i.e. trigger inflammation). When you’ve inadvertently ingested some disease-causing bacteria, this is a great response; when you’ve eaten a chocolate bar that has brushed against peanut dust in some factory, this response is just unfortunate. (…)

A future without food allergies? Quite possibly.

{ Try Nerdy | Continue reading }

photo { Erwin Olaf }

What is the universal edibility test?

G­etting lost or stranded in the wilderness is serious business, and ­you need to make sound decisions to give yourself the best chance at survival. (…) Going without food will leave you weak and apt to make poor decisions, which could endanger your life. Being able to identify edible plants in the wilderness is a good skill to have under your belt.

The problem is, there are more than 700 varieties of poisonous plant in the United States and Canada alone, so unless you have a book that clearly identifies edible species, it’s nearly impossible to determine whether or not a plant will make you sick with absolute certainty. (…)

The universal edibility test requires breaking down the parts of a plant and testing them individually over a period of 24 hours. (…)

Find something near you that’s growing in abundance. To prepare for the test, don’t eat or drink anything but water for at least eight hours beforehand.

Separate - Because only some parts of the plant may be edible, separate it into its five basic parts. These are the leaves, roots, stems, buds and flowers. There may not be buds or flowers. Check out the parts for worms or insects — you want a clean and fresh plant. Evidence of parasites or worms is a good sign that it’s rotting. If you find them, discard the plant and get another of the same variety or choose a different one.

Contact - First you need to perform a contact test. If it’s not good for your skin, it’s not good for your belly. Crush only one of the plant parts and rub it on the inside of your wrist or elbow for 15 minutes. Now wait for eight hours. If you have a reaction at the point of contact, then you don’t want to continue with this part of the plant. A burning sensation, redness, welts and bumps are all bad signs. While you wait, you can drink water, but don’t eat anything. If there is no topical reaction after eight hours, move along to the next step.

Cook - Some toxic plants become edible after they’re boiled. (…) Once you’ve boiled it, or if you’re going raw, take the plant part and hold it to your lip for three minutes. (…)

Taste - Pop the same part in your mouth and hold it on your tongue for another 15 minutes. If you experience anything unpleasant, spit it out and wash your mouth with water. (…)

If you’ve made it this far through the test, then you’re well on your way to determining if part of the plant is edible. But before you can start wolfing down that root, stem or flower, there are a few more steps to the universal edibility test: Chew, Swallow and Chow.

{ How Stuff Works | Continue reading }

By consuming fewer calories, aging can be slowed down and the development of age-related diseases such as cancer and type 2 diabetes can be delayed. The earlier calorie intake is reduced, the greater the effect.

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have now identified one of the enzymes that hold the key to the aging process.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

related { She was found dead that afternoon; poisoned by water. From salami to soda pop: what does “toxic” really mean?