Eat this

Fuelling your body is easy. Just load your plate with foods that are proven to make you stronger and healthier, eat, and repeat. Repeating this spartan meal will help you outperform and ultimately outlive others.

1. Eating whole grains has been associated with lower risk of heart disease and diabetes.
2. Salmon’s omega-3 fatty acids work to build the brain’s cell membranes, lower blood pressure, and improve circulatory function.
3. Berries are a tasty vitamin-delivery system, providing A, C, and E, along with folate, which is important for cellular metabolism and renewal. Cantaloupe contains potassium, which is crucial in keeping the heart, muscles, nerves, and digestive system working.
4. Vegetables lower blood pressure, slash heart disease risk, and help ward off stroke and cancer.
5. A glass of water before dinner will help you eat less, and drinking enough water overall aids digestion, gets nutrients efficiently to your body’s cells, and protects your organs and tissues.

Learn more here.

Hard Candy Chemistry

Richard Hartel, Ph.D., professor of food engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison boils a mixture of sugar, water and corn syrup at temperatures over 150°C (300°F) to produce hard candy. The video demonstrates how the molten liquid candy cools to form what from a technical standpoint actually is a glass. Unlike window glass made of silica, this tasty glass is made of sugar.

Synthetic sausages for dinner?

Who needs whole animals when you can grow burgers and sausages from their cells alone, in the lab – and do your bit for the environment too.

First we hunted animals for their meat. Then we developed ways to raise them on farms. Now we are on the verge of the next breakthrough. Within months labs could be growing synthetic meat for the table – and not just the usual steaks and burgers either. Meat from exotic animals could one day widen our culinary choices, for those adventurous enough to try.

Pig cells + horse foetal serum = synthetic sausage. That’s the formula for growing meat in a Petri dish.

The environmental impacts are so much lower too, these synthetic meats would need 99 per cent less land than beef farming. Learn more here or here.

Food up really close

Photographer Caren Alpert takes pictures of food. Really, really close-up pictures of food. What you see here are cake sprinkles, shot at a 65x magnification.

See more at her website here.

Why do onions make you cry?

Why do you cry when you cut up an onion?

Basically, it happens because when you slice the onion open you also break some of the onion cells. This result in some substances in the onion mixing together - enzymes and sulfur containing compounds to be precise. When these mix a chemical reaction happens which releases a gas (propanethiol S-oxide). This gas reaches your eyes, mixes with the water that keeps them moist and then another chemical reaction occurs. This reaction produces, among other things, a mild sulfuric acid, which irritates the eyes. Your eyes are very sensitive so they produce tears to wash away the nasty acid and protect your eyes. Read more here.

Electrocuted mushrooms grow better

Lightning is an atmospheric discharge of electricity accompanied by thunder … and it helps grow mushrooms – seriously!

For generations, Japanese farmers have welcomed storms over their fields based on the belief that lightning strikes provoke plentiful harvests of mushrooms.

As part of a four-year study, scientists in northern Japan have been bombarding a variety of mushrooms in lab-based garden plots with artificially induced lightning to see if electricity actually makes the fungi multiply.

The latest results show that lightning-strength jolts of electricity can more than double the yield of certain mushroom species compared with conventional cultivation methods. Read more here.

WOW !!!

Waste not want not

It is estimated that food wasted by the US and Europe could feed the world three times over. Food waste contributes to excess consumption of freshwater and fossil fuels which, along with methane and CO2 emissions from decomposing food, impacts global climate change. Every tonne of food waste prevented has the potential to save 4.2 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. If we all stop wasting food that could have been eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking one in four cars off the road. Read more here.

Turn blue to avoid paralysis

The same blue food dye found in M&Ms and Gatorade could be used to reduce damage caused by spine injuries, offering a better chance of recovery, according to new research.

Fifteen minutes after this rat was paralyzed, researchers injected the rodent with Brilliant Blue G dye, a derivative of common food coloring Blue Number One. The dye reduced inflammation of the spinal cord, which allowed the rats to take clumsy steps—but not walk—within weeks.

In both rats and people, secondary inflammation following spinal cord trauma causes more lasting damage than the initial injury: Swelling sparks a small “stroke,” which stops blood flow and eventually kills off the surrounding tissue. If administered within four hours after a spinal cord injury in rats, Brilliant Blue G dye prevents inflammation, thereby staving off permanent paralysis. Read more here or here.

Eat fat to pass exams

Indulging in a fatty meal after studying for an exam could boost your results. A study in rats shows that eating a certain type of fat produces a hormone that helps the brain cement short-term memories into long-term ones.

The findings make sense from an evolutionary perspective. When foraging animals find a fatty meal, they do well to remember exactly where and how they found it.

Importantly, it has to be just the right type of fat, a healthy unsaturated fat called oleic acid. So a cheeseburger after a night of cramming may not work – try food with olive oil or soybean oil. Read more here.

I don’t like tea anyway

People are advised to wait a few minutes before drinking a cup of freshly-boiled tea today as a new study, published on the British Medical Journal website, finds that drinking very hot tea (70°C or more) can increase the risk of cancer of the oesophagus, the muscular tube that carries food from the throat to the stomach.

Researchers stress that the findings are not cause for alarm, and they should not reduce public enthusiasm for the time honoured ritual of drinking tea. Instead they suggest waiting at least four minutes before drinking a cup of freshly boiled tea, or more generally allowing foods and beverages to cool from “scalding” to “tolerable” before swallowing.

WOW! Read more here.