Feeling Tired? It's Time To Make Health Decisions

From keeping up a daily exercise routine to eating healthy foods and avoiding impulse purchases, self-control is hard work. Ironically, when it comes to making decisions about our bodies, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research finds we make better health care decisions when we’re...
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No Large Costs Involved In Improving Biodiversity in Production Forests

Forest management is based on recommendations that are supposed to maximize economic revenues. However, in 40% of cases a better economic result would be achieved by neglecting some of the recommendations. This would also greatly benefit biodiversity.
These results were obtained by a research...
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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."