Hospital Food Anyone?
There’s a new virus spreading around geriatric wards of the UK’s National Health Service and it’s got hospital managers quaking in their pinstriped suits. Even more worrying than MRSA, this infectious little viral is set to infect the elderly, making them – and their carers – proactive.
The Environmental Impact of NutritionandFoodSciences…dot org
We’ve explored obesity in many different forms during the course of this year and if you’re a regular Handpicked reader (enter your email in the box on the left and click on ‘subscribe’ to become one if you’re not already), you’ll by now be well aware of a recurring theme in our nutrition posts. Energy.…
Intellectual activity blamed for obesity epidemic
Its becoming a hobby of mine, spotting odd reasons for the obesity epidemic. Here’s the latest: don’t read the next bit too closely and certainly don’t analyse it because the intellectual activity could be bad for your body weight. That’s what a study in Psychosomatic Medicine suggests at first glance.
…get out of the kitchen
One of the implications of all this energy we waste to swap coffee and wheat is that we’re giving climate change a helping hand. The contribution made by today’s food production systems to climate change globally will have tremendous impacts on the food it produces in the future. So this week, in a document much…
If you can’t stand the heat…
We have often encountered the first law of thermodynamics in this blog, or at least as it applies to obesity. This week the Second Law – the law that governs entropy and the movement of heat -has taken centre stage for a change. CABI’s own Peter Baker has dealt with the subject eloquently this week…
How do those Olympic swimmers do it?
With Michael Phelps well on his way to a record haul of gold medals in the Olympic pool, and much discussion in the media about the 12,000 calorie diet he eats in training (don’t try it at home, is the message from most writers), a timely addition to the Cab Abstracts database this week looks…
Recent Television Reviews
Well it has been a veritable delight of televisual output from the BBC in recent weeks with “Lost Land of the Jaguar” and “Britain from Above”. If you have missed any of these and are lucky enough to have access to the iPlayer I would recommend a catch-up, otherwise clips have been placed on YouTube…
Disease outbreaks on the map
Earlier this month I came across an article in the BMJ about HealthMap, a website that automatically monitors and disseminates information on disease outbreaks; some of the people involved describe it in more detail in an article1 in PLoS Medicine. The traditional disease surveillance network suffers from gaps in coverage and sometimes from restricted flow…
You say tomato, I say cardioprotective antiplatelet factor
Studies directly on platelets show that tomato juice and kiwi fruit juice are both potent at preventing platelet aggregation.
Obesity & Diet -a new twist
It’s not what you eat but what your mother eats that could set your bodyweight, suggest scientists at Baylor College of Medicine. Robert Waterland and colleagues studying mice with a genetic tendency to overeat found that successive generations of the mice became fatter. This increasing obesity was prevented by a diet rich in folate and…