What Do Bacteria “Say”?

In a study published today in Nature Communications, a research team led by Ken Shepard, professor of electrical engineering and biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, and Lars Dietrich, assistant professor of biological sciences at Columbia University, has demonstrated that integrated...
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Milk Protein Measurement Standard Expanded

IDF and ISO have joined forces to expand the scope of an international standard used worldwide in the dairy industry to measure the protein content of cow’s milk. The Kjeldahl method* now encompasses milk from other species as well as internationally traded dairy products covered by Codex...
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Manga Comics May Improve Healthy Snack Selection

A recent pilot study in Brooklyn, New York, with minority students found that exposure to Manga comics (Japanese comic art) promoting fruit intake significantly improved healthy snack selection. As snacking accounts for up to 27% of children’s daily caloric intake, and childhood obesity...
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Sin Pesticidas, Controlan Mosca De La Fruta En Cultivos De Naranja

La infestación de cultivos de naranja por mosca mexicana de la fruta y la cancelación de exportaciones de pulpa cítrica congelada que experimentó la empresa veracruzana Cítricos EX (Citrex), motivó a su área de investigación a crear una técnica eficaz en el control de la plaga sin usar pesticid...
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Pacific Trade Winds Stall Global Surface Warming

The strongest trade winds have driven more of the heat from global warming into the oceans; but when those winds slow, that heat will rapidly return to the atmosphere causing an abrupt rise in global average temperatures
Heat stored in the western Pacific Ocean caused by an unprecedented...
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Bees, Birds And Bats Linked To Better Coffee Harvest

Bees, birds and bats make a huge contribution to the high yields produced by coffee farmers around Mount Kilimanjaro – an example of how biodiversity can pay off. This effect has been described as result of a study now published in the „Proceedings of the Royal Society B“. It has been conducted b...
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A Potential For Research On Diversification Linked To Aquatic Insects

Inland waters cover less than 1% of the Earth’s surface yet harbor 10% of all known animal species, 60% of them being aquatic insects. Nearly 100,000 species from 12 orders spend one or more life stages in freshwater. Still today, little is known on how this remarkable diversity arose....
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Drifting Herbicides Produce Uncertain Effects

Farmers should take extra precautions so drifting herbicides do not create unintended consequences on neighboring fields and farms, according to agricultural researchers.
The researchers found a range of effects — positive, neutral and negative — when they sprayed the herbicide...
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EU Funds New Large-scale Aquaponics Project

How can we cope with the global future challenges? The growing world population induces competition for water, land, food, and energy. But resources are limited, and unsustainable agricultural practices and climate change are aggravating these problems. Therefore, the European Union (EU) decided...
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How Smell Perception Influences Food Intake?

A research team led by Giovanni Marsicano, a Inserm Research Director at Unit 862 (NeuroCentre Magendie, Bordeaux), has succeeded in elucidating how the endocannabinoid system controls food intake through its effects on the perception of smells. These results are due to appear in the...
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New Online Resource Centre Developed To Improve Food Safety

Food scare make authorities uneasy. In previous cases, national food safety agencies have not always known how to react, making the public wary. For example, in 2011, the German health authorities incorrectly linked the deadly E. coli outbreak to cucumbers from Spanish greenhouses. The ensuing pa...
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Hemp Plant Can Be A Cooking Oil Contender

Scientists at the University of York today report the development of hemp plants with a dramatically increased content of oleic acid. The new oil profile results in an attractive cooking oil that is similar to olive oil in terms of fatty acid content having a much longer shelf life as well as...
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Researchers Develop Better Broccoli With Longer Shelf Life

While researching methods to increase the already well-recognized anti-cancer properties of broccoli, researchers at the University of Illinois also found a way to prolong the vegetable’s shelf life.
And, according to the recently published study, the method is a natural and inexpensive way to p...
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Yogurt Reduces The Risk Of Type 2 Diabetes

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) shows that higher consumption of yoghurt, compared with no consumption, can reduce the risk of new-onset type 2 diabetes by 28%. Scientists at the University of Cambridge found that in fact ...
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Wal-Mart Linked To Crime Rates Declines?

Communities across the United States experienced an unprecedented decline in crime in the 1990s. But for counties where Wal-Mart built stores, the decline wasn’t nearly as dramatic.
“The crime decline was stunted in counties where Wal-Mart expanded in the 1990s,” says Scott...
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Will Your Kid Be An Overweight Adult?

Try this: ask five hundred people what they believe most contributed from their childhoods to how slim or overweight they are as adults. Could they — the crowd — discover insights into eating behaviors that experts may not have considered?
Apparently, yes.
An international group of researchers, i...
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Healthy Diet of Fruit and Vegetables Extends Life Expectancy in Women

Women in their seventies who exercise and eat healthy amounts of fruits and vegetables have a longer life expectancy, according to research published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University studied 713 women aged 70 to 79 years who took part in the Women's Health and Aging Studies. This study was designed to evaluate the causes and course of physical disability in older women living in the community.

"A number of studies have measured the positive impact of exercise and healthy eating on life expectancy, but what makes this study unique is that we looked at these two factors together," explains lead author, Dr. Emily J Nicklett, from the University of Michigan School of Social Work.

Researchers found that the women who were most physically active and had the highest fruit and vegetable consumption were eight times more likely to survive the five-year follow-up period than the women with the lowest rates.

To estimate the amount of fruits and vegetables the women ate, the researchers measured blood levels of carotenoids-beneficial plant pigments that the body turns into antioxidants, such as beta-carotene. The more fruits and vegetables consumed, the higher the levels of carotenoids in the bloodstream..

Study participants' physical activity was measured through a questionnaire that asked the amount of time the spent doing various levels of physical activity, which was then converted to the number of calories expended.

The women were then followed up to establish the links between healthy eating, exercise and survival rates.

Key research findings included:

• More than half of the 713 participants (53%) didn't do any exercise, 21% were moderately active, and the remaining 26% were in the most active group at the study's outset.
• During the five-year follow up, 11.5% of the participants died. Serum carotenoid levels were 12% higher in the women who survived and total physical activity was more than twice as high.
• Women in the most active group at baseline had a 71% lower five-year death rate than the women in the least active group.
• Women in the highest carotenoid group at baseline had a 46% lower five-year death rate than the women in the lowest carotenoid group.
• When taken together, physical activity levels and total serum carotenoids predicted better survival.

"Given the success in smoking cessation, it is likely that maintenance of a healthy diet and high levels of physical activity will become the strongest predictors of health and longevity. Programs and policies to promote longevity should include interventions to improve nutrition and physical activity in older adults," said Dr. Nicklett.

When You Eat Matters, Not Just What You Eat

When it comes to weight gain, when you eat might be at least as important as what you eat.

When mice on a high-fat diet are restricted to eating for eight hours per day, they eat just as much as those who can eat around the clock, yet they are protected against obesity and other metabolic ills, the new study shows. The discovery suggests that the health consequences of a poor diet might result in part from a mismatch between our body clocks and our eating schedules.

"Every organ has a clock," said lead author of the study Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. That means there are times that our livers, intestines, muscles, and other organs will work at peak efficiency and other times when they are—more or less—sleeping.

Those metabolic cycles are critical for processes from cholesterol breakdown to glucose production, and they should be primed to turn on when we eat and back off when we don't, or vice versa. When mice or people eat frequently throughout the day and night, it can throw off those normal metabolic cycles.

"When we eat randomly, those genes aren't on completely or off completely," Panda said. The principle is just like it is with sleep and waking, he explained. If we don't sleep well at night, we aren't completely awake during the day, and we work less efficiently as a consequence.

To find out whether restricted feeding alone—without a change in calorie intake—could prevent metabolic disease, Panda's team fed mice either a standard or high-fat diet with one of two types of food access: ad lib feeding or restricted access.

The time-restricted mice on a high-fat diet were protected from the adverse effects of a high-fat diet and showed improvements in their metabolic and physiological rhythms. They gained less weight and suffered less liver damage. The mice also had lower levels of inflammation, among other benefits.

Panda says there is reason to think our eating patterns have changed in recent years, as many people have greater access to food and reasons to stay up into the night, even if just to watch TV. And when people are awake, they tend to snack.

The findings suggest that restricted meal times might be an underappreciated lifestyle change to help people keep off the pounds. At the very least, the new evidence suggests that this is a factor in the obesity epidemic that should be given more careful consideration.

"The focus has been on what people eat," Panda said. "We don't collect data on when people eat."

Are Women’s Handbags Dirtier Than Toilets?

Women's handbags have more microbes than those that exist in most toilets surface of the toilets. Women put the bag all over the place. They take the bag with them all the time and are passing germs from hand to bag. And no bleach goes in the bag.

The study carried out by Maulori Cabral, Professor at the Institute of Microbiology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) reveals that hand cream, lipstick and make-up kits are the dirtiest items that women carry in their handbags. The study compared findings with research carried out by the UK market research company Initial Washroom Hygiene which specializes in cleaning public toilets.

Maulori Cabral agrees with the research. "That's what she (the woman) touches more often, but from the outside". He explained that the lipsticks, themselves, already have antimicrobial agents. The same is true regarding hand cream. Vials containing cream are all the time being held by female hands.

Maulori Cabral clarified that when a person holds an object, he/she transfers part of his/her microbiota to it. "Every living creature you meet has a population of microbes associated with the body itself. Each person has their bacterial populations. This set of bacterial populations that is associated with a body called microbiota," he said.

Cabral ruled out, however, that the fact that handbag presents more microbes than the surface of toilets endangers human health. "No way. This is all about creating panic. The microbiota is part of the evolution of living beings. Each person carries about 100 trillion bacteria. The adult body consists of 10 trillion cells that are descendants of fertilization, i.e. our embryonic origin". When the creature is born, it becomes contaminated with bacteria, including from the mother herself, and when it becomes an adult, the person carries ten times more bacteria than embryonic cells. "When you touch something, you pass your microbes onto it".

In the virologist´s assessment, washing your hands so often does not reduce the number of bacteria present in women's handbags. What you need is always to wash the hands before meals and after going to the bathroom. "When you wash your hands, you do not get rid of your germs, you get rid of the germs of others. Because yours are part of your microbiota. The microbes belonging to others are the ones that can harm you, or not".

Cabral reiterated that human beings are born to live with microbes. "Dressing microbes up as something evil is the greatest absurdity". He said that children take lactobacillus alive because it is good for their health and said that microbial contamination is a natural thing. Although microbes are invisible, they are the most powerful beings on the planet," stated the UFRJ Professor.

 "Microbes are part of everyday life," Cabral explained that as the human being is a social animal, men greet each other, exchanging microbes in the handshake. "The first thing you do is: here, have some of my microbes and give me some of yours". When there is more intimacy with another person, kisses are exchanged. "Then the thing complicates" because, according to Cabral, each droplet of saliva has 100,000 bacteria. "But is there anything better than swapping bacteria?" joked the professor. This means that the more intimate the greeting, the more microbiota are shared.

Improving Food Safety by Monitoring Suppliers and Traceability

Food safety concerns have been on the rise since the horsemeat scandal earlier this year showed how little control many food companies really have over their supply chain. Public confidence has been shaken as a result of these fraudulent actions. The horsemeat scandal has demonstrated the importance of proper controls.

When something goes wrong and food or feed product is recalled, the loss of product is really the least of concerns, as damage to the brand and subsequent lawsuits quickly outpace the cost of the recall itself.

In the past, food companies have relied on third-party external audits to make sure their suppliers and food processors were delivering a high quality product, but the third-party audits are often announced well ahead of time and were paid for by the suppliers and manufacturers. Supplier auditing has become more common.

The hazards include microbiological, chemical, including allergens and physical, issues that can cause food to be unsafe, shall be controlled and monitored by a strong food safety management system. If unchecked, they could lead to serious brand or/and financial damage for the business.

Food safety management system is term that encompasses many aspects of handling, preparation and storage of food to prevent illness and injury. A priority of food quality is control of:

• Chemical properties of which allergens can be life threatening to some people, or vitamin and mineral content which affect the overall quality of the food.
• Physical particles which are crucial but are not as significant in terms of food safety. As glass and metal can be hazardous and cause serious injury to consumers. 
• Microbiological hazards such bacteria, viruses and toxins are possible contaminants of food and impact food safety.

Food manufacturers and distributors are increasingly concerned about building effective food safety management system, decreasing the possibility of occurring food safety events and then control corporate managing risk.

User friendly tools which will help maintaining supplier approval process and verifying internal policies, procedures and systems have been developed by a team of food safety experts.

The Food Safety Audit, Supplier Risk Assessment, BRC Issue 6 Audit and Traceability Audit aim at reducing and preventing issues along the supply chain, from the suppliers to the customer.

Supplier Risk Assessment is the process of evaluating risks to safety, legality and quality of the products. To get a full picture of suppliers individualized risk assessments shall be made on the performance of each supplier.

Food Safety Audits are a crucial aspects of maintaining food safety standards, by providing transparency and assurance that standards are being maintained.

Traceability is a way of responding to potential risks that can arise in food and feed, to ensure that all food products are safe.

Traceability is a risk management tool, allowing food businesses to withdraw or recall products that have been identified as unsafe.

BRC Issue 6 Audits are a systematic, independent and documented activity in which objective evidence is gathered and assessed to determine if a food safety system is appropriate and effective. BRC Issue 6 Audits also provide evidence that food is manufactured in a safe environment and help determine if hazards are properly identified and controlled or eliminated.

See more at http://www.haccpeuropa.com