A University of Maastricht study found that eating at least four small meals daily reduces obesity risk by 45 percent. This Dutch study also found that people who skip breakfast are five times as likely to become obese as regular breakfasters.
Yet a University of Ottawa study found that eating many small meals doesn’t promote weight loss. So did a French National Center for Scientific Research study, which trashed grazing: “Epidemiological studies which have suggested that nibbling is associated with leanness are extremely vulnerable to methodological errors,” its authors warn.
A UC Berkeley study found that “alternate-day fasting” — feasting one day, fasting the next, ad infinitum — might decrease the risk of heart disease and cancer.
Researching the effects of meal frequency is notoriously tricky, because it involves so many variables: nutritional content, time of day, exercise, genetics. So the scientific jury is still out.
“There is no biological reason for eating three meals a day,” says Yale University history professor Paul Freedman.
{ “Miss A—” pictured in 1866 and in 1870 after treatment. She was one of the earliest Anorexia nervosa case studies. The term anorexia nervosa was established in 1873 by Sir William Gull, one of Queen Victoria’s personal physicians. The term is of Greek origin: an- (prefix denoting negation) and orexis (appetite). | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
As onions are sliced, cells are broken, allowing enzymes called alliinases to break down amino acid sulphoxides and generate sulphenic acids.
A specific sulfenic acid, 1-propenesulfenic acid, formed when onions are cut, is rapidly rearranged by a second enzyme, called the lachrymatory factor synthase, giving syn-propanethial-S-oxide a volatile gas known as the onion lachrymatory factor (LF).
The LF gas diffuses through the air and eventually reaches the eye, where it activates sensory neurons, creating a stinging sensation. Tear glands produce tears to dilute and flush out the irritant. Chemicals that exhibit such an effect on the eyes are known as lachrymatory agents.
Supplying ample water to the reaction while peeling onions prevents the gas from reaching the eyes. Eye irritation can, therefore, be avoided by cutting onions under running water or submerged in a basin of water.
Another way to reduce irritation is by chilling, or by not cutting off the root of the onion (or by doing it last), as the root of the onion has a higher concentration of enzymes.
Regular and moderate alcohol consumption in working middle-aged women has been found to improve their health by helping them to ‘wind down’.
The new study, published in PLoS Medicine today, analysed data from the U.S. Nurse’s Health Study, a long-term study that has tracked the health conditions of 121,700 female nurses since 1976. (…)
The researchers found that those middle-aged women (median age 58 years) who drank five to 15 grams of alcohol per day were 20% more likely to have good overall health when older, in comparison to non-drinkers.
‘“Most people are simply not designed to eat pasta:” evolutionary explanations for obesity in the low-carbohydrate diet movement
Low-carbohydrate diets, notably the Atkins Diet, were particularly popular in Britain and North America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On the basis of a discourse analysis of bestselling low-carbohydrate diet books, I examine and critique genetic and evolutionary explanations for obesity and diabetes as they feature in the low-carbohydrate literature. Low-carbohydrate diet books present two distinct neo-Darwinian explanations of health and body-weight. First, evolutionary nutrition is based on the premise that the human body has adapted to function best on the diet eaten in the Paleolithic era. Second, the thrifty gene theory suggests that feast-or-famine conditions during human evolutionary development naturally selected for people who could store excess energy as body fat for later use. However, the historical narratives and scientific arguments presented in the low-carbohydrate literature are beset with generalisations, inconsistencies and errors.
The idea of the Paleo diet has been around for decades, but it’s really taken off over the last couple of years. It’s based on the idea that while humans have been eating for approximately 200,000 years, we’ve been farming for only about the last 10,000 or so. Farming introduced easily produced grains into our society, and bread, pasta, and other starch-heavy and processed foods into our diets. Evolution is too slow, the story goes, for us to have adapted to this new diet. So these “new” foods are responsible for many specific health problems we encounter, as well as a general feeling of un-wellness that most of us unwittingly life with. By returning to the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the proponents of Paleo claim, we can restore our happiness, health, and waistlines.
I had to give it a shot. And you know what? It’s been pretty great. After a few weeks, I’ve lost weight, I feel better, and the two-hour-plus sluggish period that used to follow lunch just about every day is gone. That’s while eating sort of like a pig—meat, vegetables, nuts, eggs, fish, all cooked with butter and scarfed down with gleeful self-contentment. I get hungry less often, and when I do it’s a different sort of hunger; not nagging and brain-debilitating, but more natural-feeling and subtle, almost healthy.
If we don’t reverse the current trend in food prices, we’ve got until August 2013 before social unrest sweeps the planet, say complexity theorists.
What causes riots? That’s not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.
But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they’ve found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.
This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.
One potential contributing factor to increasing rates of overweight and obesity is the availability and affordability of a wide range of food choices. A variety of inexpensive fast food options provides consumers the ability to rotate restaurant selection and reduce the risk of monotony in food selection.
Animal studies demonstrate that animals provided the same types of food (or other types of rewards) tend to reduce the level of consumption. This is a behavioral trait known as habituation. Habituation represents the tendency to reduce total caloric intake when eating the same foods and to increase caloric intake when presented novel food choices. (…)
If you are interested in losing weight, eating the same thing daily may be a way to use the habituation process to aid calorie restriction.
The 1980s was a heady and decadent time for rock stars. Stories of bad behavior by some of rock’s finest – be it trashing hotel rooms or simple prima donna demands – were splashed all over the headlines. And few of those stories were as famous as the “Van Halen and M&Ms” story.
In case you weren’t around during the 80s, the rock supergroup Van Halen had a clause in their concert contracts that stipulated that the band would “be provided with one large bowl of M&M candies, with all brown candies removed.” (…)
David Lee Roth: “I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean “What is this before me?” …you know, with the skull in one hand… and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.”
For someone who remembers the old days, the food is the most startling thing about modern England. English food used to be deservedly famous for its awfulness–greasy fish and chips, gelatinous pork pies, and dishwater coffee. Now it is not only easy to do much better, but traditionally terrible English meals have even become hard to find. What happened?
Maybe the first question is how English cooking got to be so bad in the first place. A good guess is that the country’s early industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas), preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).
But why did the food stay so bad after refrigerated railroad cars and ships, frozen foods (better than canned, anyway), and eventually air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become available? Now we’re talking about economics–and about the limits of conventional economic theory. For the answer is surely that by the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference. The appreciation of good food is, quite literally, an acquired taste–but because your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one.
This was in Japan, so the major breakfast staples were white rice and white bread. (…)
The kids who had rice for breakfast showed higher grey matter volumes than those who had bread. The authors of the study related this to cognitive performance, and said that the rice group had higher IQ scores and POI scores compared to the bread group. (…)
For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt. (…)
This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure.
In May, European researchers reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease.
These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.
For a long time, the mechanisms of taste seemed relatively straightforward. (…) Ever since Democritus hypothesized in the fourth century B.C. that the sensation of taste was an effect of the shape of food particles, the tongue has been seen as a simple sensory organ. (…) Plato believed Democritus. (…) Aristotle believed Plato. In De Anima, the four primary tastes Aristotle described were the already classic sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.
Over the ensuing millennium, this ancient theory remained largely unquestioned. The tongue was seen as a mechanical sensor, in which the qualities of foods were impressed upon its papillaed surface. The discovery of taste buds in the 19th century gave new credence to this theory. Under a microscope, these cells looked like little keyholes into which our chewed food might fit, thus triggering a taste sensation. By the start of the 20th century, scientists were beginning to map the tongue, consigning each of our four flavors to a specific area. The tip of our tongue loved sweet things, while the sides preferred sour. The back of our tongue was sensitive to bitter flavors, and saltiness was sensed everywhere. The sensation of taste was that simple.
If only. We now know that our taste receptors are exquisitely complicated little sensors, and that there are at least five different receptor types scattered all over the mouth, not four. (The fifth receptor is sensitive to the amino acid glutamate, aka umami.) Furthermore, the tongue is only a small part of flavor: As anyone with a stuffy nose knows, the pleasure of food largely depends on its aroma. In fact, neuroscientists estimate that up to 90 percent of what we perceive as taste is actually smell. (…)
Perhaps the most shocking discovery from this new science of taste, however, is that the act of eating is not the only source of gustatory pleasure. Instead, a big chunk part of our sensory delight — the joy that makes us crave particular foods — comes afterwards, when the food is winding its way through the gut.
While it is recognized that Barbie dolls are perceived as feminine and Action figures as masculine, less is considered about the gender associations related to everyday items like the food we choose to eat. A series of studies reveal for instance that sour dairy products tend to be perceived as relatively feminine, whereas meat tends to be perceived as relatively masculine. Men are inclined to forgo their intrinsic preferences to conform to a masculine gender identity. Women, on the other hand, appear to be less concerned with making gender-congruent choices.
Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse. (…)
Evidence of the nostalgia abounds. (…) The surest sign that this nostalgia has reached a critical mass, though, is that food companies have begun to board the retro bus. (…) Mountain Dew (featuring a cartoon hillbilly from the 1960s) in which they’ve replaced “bad” high-fructose corn syrup with “good” cane sugar. (…)
It’s unlikely that most serious food reformers think America can or should dismantle our industrial food system and return to an agrarian way of life. But the idea that “Food used to be better” so pervades the rhetoric about what ails our modern food system that it is hard not to conclude that rolling back the clock would provide at least some of the answers. The trouble is, it wouldn’t. And even if it would, the prospect of a return to Green Acres just isn’t very appealing to a lot of people who know what life there is really like.
{ Okinawans are among the world’s longest-lived people. More important, elders living in this lush subtropical archipelago tend to enjoy years free from disabilities. Okinawans have a fifth the heart disease, a fourth the breast and prostate cancer, and a third less dementia than Americans. A lean diet may be a factor. “A heaping plate of Okinawan vegetables, tofu, miso soup, and a little fish or meat will have fewer calories than a small hamburger,” says Makoto Suzuki. “And it will have many more healthy nutrients.” What’s more, many Okinawans who grew up before World War II never developed the tendency to overindulge. They still live by the Confucian-inspired adage “hara hachi bu–eat until your stomach is 80 percent full.” | National Geographic | Continue reading }
{ For one month, the ants, which usually thrive on seeds, are being fed a steady diet of McDonald’s Happy Meals. They even get the toys. The ants are housed in a roughly 6-by-10-foot plexiglass farm that is packed with Perlite pebbles and sealed with clear packing tape and nylon panty hose. Elizabeth Demaray, an artist based in Brooklyn, worked hand in hand with Dr. Christine Johnson, a scientific assistant at the American Museum of Natural History who specializes in ant research. | NY Times, 2010 | Continue reading }
Times change, and with them what, where, and how people eat. In fifteenth-century London a man could be hanged for eating meat on Friday. An ancient Roman was expected to wear a wreath to a banquet. The potato in sixteenth-century Europe was believed to cause leprosy and syphilis. As of two years ago, 19% of America’s meals were being eaten in cars.
Just across the river from Detroit, Lakeshore is where barrels of Canadian Club whiskey age in blocky, windowless warehouses. Scott, who had recently completed his PhD in mycology at the University of Toronto, had launched a business called Sporometrics. Run out of his apartment, it was a sort of consulting detective agency for companies that needed help dealing with weird fungal infestations. The first call he got after putting up his website was from a director of research at Hiram Walker Distillery named David Doyle.
Doyle had a problem. In the neighborhood surrounding his Lakeshore warehouses, homeowners were complaining about a mysterious black mold coating their houses. And the residents, following their noses, blamed the whiskey. Doyle wanted to know what the mold was and whether it was the company’s fault. Scott headed up to Lakeshore to take a look.
When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.
Standing at a black-stained fence, Doyle explained that the distillery had been trying to solve the mystery for more than a decade. Mycologists at the University of Windsor were stumped. A team from the Scotch Whisky Association’s Research Institute had taken samples and concluded it was just a thick layer of normal environmental fungi: Aspergillus, Exophiala, stuff like that. Ubiquitous and—maybe most important—in no way the distillery’s fault.
Scott shook his head. “David,” he said, “that’s not what it is. It’s something completely different.”
Leave fruit juice on its own for a few days or weeks and yeast—a type of fungus—will appear as if by magic. In one of nature’s great miracles, yeast eats sugar and excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol, the chemical that makes booze boozy. That’s fermentation.
If fermentation is a miracle of nature, then distillation is a miracle of science. Heat a fermented liquid and the lighter, more volatile chemical components—alcohols, ketones, esters, and so on—evaporate and separate from the heavier ones (like water). That vapor, cooled and condensed into a liquid, is a spirit. Do it to wine, you get brandy; beer, you get whiskey. Distill anything enough times and you get vodka. When it’s executed right, the process concentrates a remarkable array of aromatic and flavorful chemicals.
