China’s functional food honey-trap
Two brief reports in the most recent edition of Food Manufacture magazine reflect the fascination that the western industrialised world has in the opportunities and dangers of doing business in China. On the one hand, a delegation of food manufacturers and academics brought back information on some 8000 ingredients used in traditional Chinese medicine from…
Atkins – the right strategy for the wrong reasons?
‘Atkins is best diet around, says Stanford University.’ Apparently, though I am sure that many scientists looking at the study in any sort of detail might wonder how Stanford’s nutritionists have managed to reach this conclusion. A few years ago, when the Atkins craze was at its height, a number of studies commissioned to test…
Fat, me?
According to a study published in Cell Metabolism, the brain circuitry of obese mice is in denial about the state of the rest of the mouse’s body. While this may also be true of the conscious brains of many overweight or obese human subjects, research hasn’t yet extended this far, except in the numerous body…
USDA Support For GM Rice With Human Genes
The US Department of Agriculture is allowing Ventria Bioscience to go ahead with field-scale cultivation of rice containing human genes that can be used to help fight diarrhoea. The company has introduced human genes into rice that encode lactoferrin and lysozyme, two proteins found naturally in breast milk. Ventria recently reported a Journal of Pediatric…
Is circumcision the answer to HIV?
Two randomised controlled trials from Kenya and Uganda reported in the Lancet this week have shown that circumcising men can halve the HIV infection rate. This is great news for controlling HIV, confirming what has been suspected for years. The operation is cheap and simple to carry out and just has to be done once.…
More good news for coffee drinkers!
Winter is traditionally a season of excess followed by deprivation. Not only do many of us inflict misery and suffering on ourselves in the form of New Years’ resolutions at a time when we really want to be tucked up under the duvet with a boxful of chocolates, but, just as we start to look…
Trans fats — the wrong target?
Trans fats. I keep seeing them in the news: New York restaurants have banned them, McDonalds as well, but how much effect is this likely to have on the public’s health? In my opinion attention would be better focussed on the daily diet not on eating out and on saturated fat not trans fat. Trans…
‘I love you like meat loves salt’
For a long time it was assumed that salt was a necessary additive in food processing, especially meat. In fact, the food industry resisted calls to reduce its use of salt for many years, often launching scathing attacks disputing the mounting evidence that it was bad for us. The quote above, in case you’re interested…
The hypertension controversy
Suggesting that there might be controversy in the link between salt intake and hypertension in itself might seem a little controversial, given the vast amount of media attention that our salt intake has received over recent years. But controversial it is. Some 45 published papers on ‘salt and hypertension’ were uploaded onto the CAB Abstracts…
Why salt?
Those of you who were paying attention yesterday will already be aware that I have been doing a bit of salt mining. This is fairly easy to get away with when, like me, you’re new to the database and thus ‘have to get to grips with it’. So I have been plugging in various ‘preferred’…