This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Chinese mitten crabs are a delicacy among some seafood lovers: deeply savory, with a distinctive tinge of sweetness. Diners crack the shells open and eat the meat piping hot, dipped in rice vinegar and soy sauce with sliced ginger. The unique flavor of the crabs, most of which are grown in farms on China’s Yangtze River, is crucial to their popularity. When it comes to seafood, research shows that consumers prioritize taste above all else—including health benefits and environmental sustainability.

“All other things sort of fall by the wayside,” says Grant Murray, a marine policy researcher at Duke University in North Carolina who studies consumer seafood choices. “If it doesn’t look good and smell good and taste good, nobody’s going to buy it.”

Now, new research by biochemists at China’s Soochow University and Kunshan Yangcheng Lake Crab Industrial Research Institute suggests that when coveted mitten crabs are fed black soldier fly larvae, they can be made even tastier.

The researchers swapped out the regular diet of farmed mitten crabs—mostly ground-up fish caught as by-catch—for the lab-grown black soldier fly larvae, which have become a promising alternative aquaculture feed for species from Atlantic salmon to tilapia, carp, and catfish. The larvae are high in protein and fat, and they’re quick, easy, and safe to produce, says Murray, who was not involved in the study.

After feeding 12 captive crabs black soldier fly larvae for two months, the scientists measured the meat for important taste-enhancing amino acids including glutamic acid, which can intensify a food’s umami or savory taste, and glycine and arginine, which determine sweetness and bitterness. These molecules, which are present in the larvae, are deposited in the crustaceans’ tissues as they grow. After eating the larvae, the crabs’ muscles contained higher levels of sweet amino acids and lower levels of bitter amino acids. Male crabs also had more amino acids associated with umami flavor in their gonads, which diners eat with the rest of the crab.

Not everyone is convinced that the shift in amino acids will amount to a tastier crustacean though. It’s plausible, says Charles Spence, a sensory researcher at the University of Oxford in England who was not involved in the study. But taste relies on many factors beyond chemistry, including scent, temperature, texture, cooking method, and what the food is paired with, says Spence. Since a taste test was not part of the study, “who knows what things are going to taste like?” And simply adding flavor enhancers, such as umami-elevating MSG, doesn’t always produce the desired effect, he says, otherwise chefs would be adding salt, sugar, or MSG to every single dish.

In the long run, producing a tastier mitten crab by feeding it a more environmentally friendly feed could be a win-win—driving consumers to eat more sustainably, even when it’s not their primary priority. Yet even if mitten crabs were 10 or 20 percent more delicious, says Murray, that doesn’t mean they’re going to become more popular.

Still, as part of the greater push to green our diets, this may be one way to eat more insects without actually having to eat them yourself.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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For Taylor Arnold, a registered dietitian nutritionist, feeding her second baby was not easy. At eight weeks old, he screamed when he ate and wouldn’t gain much weight. Arnold brought him to a gastroenterologist, who diagnosed him with allergic proctocolitis — an immune response to the proteins found in certain foods, which she narrowed down to cow’s milk.

Cow’s milk protein allergies, or CMPA, appear to be on the rise — following a similar trend to other children’s food allergies — and they can upend a caregiver’s feeding plans: A breastfeeding parent is often told to eliminate dairy from their diet, or switch to a specialized hypoallergenic formula, which can be expensive.

But while the evidence suggests that CMPA rates are climbing, the source of that increase remains unclear. Some experts say part of the reason is that doctors are getting better at recognizing symptoms. Others claim the condition is overdiagnosed, which could have health consequences, such as an increased risk of developing additional allergies later in life. And among those who believe that milk allergy rates are inflated, some suspect the global formula industry, valued at $55 billion according to a 2022 report from the World Health Organization and UNICEF, may have an undue influence.

Meanwhile, “no one has ever studied these kids in a systematic way,” said Victoria Martin, a pediatric gastroenterologist and allergy researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s pretty unusual in disease that is this common, that has been going on for this long, that there hasn’t been more careful, controlled study.”

This lack of clarity can leave doctors in the dark about how to diagnose the condition and leave parents with more questions than answers about how best to treat it.

When Arnold’s son became sick with CMPA symptoms, it was “really, really stressful,” she told Undark. Plus, “I didn’t get a lot of support from the doctors, and that was frustrating.”

Though the gastroenterologist recommended she switch to formula, Arnold ultimately used a lactation consultant and gave up dairy so she could continue breastfeeding. But she said she can understand why others might not make the same choice: “A lot of moms go to formula because there’s not a lot of support for how to manage the diet.”

Food allergies primarily come in two forms: One, called an IgE-mediated allergy, has symptoms that appear soon after ingesting a food — such as swelling, hives, or difficulty breathing — and may be confirmed by a skin prick test. The second, which Arnold’s son was diagnosed with, is a non-IgE-mediated allergy or food protein-induced allergic proctocolitis, and is much harder to diagnose.

With non-IgE allergies, symptom onset often doesn’t happen immediately after a person eats a triggering food and there is no test to confirm a diagnosis. (Some specialists don’t like to call the condition an allergy because it doesn’t present with classic allergy symptoms.) Instead, physicians often rely on past training, online resources, or published guidelines written by experts in the field, which list symptoms and help doctors make a treatment plan.

Numerous such guidelines exist to help providers diagnose milk allergies, but the process is not always straightforward. “It’s a perfect storm” of vague and common symptoms and no diagnostic test, said Adam Fox, a pediatric allergist and a professor at King’s College London, noting that commercial interests such as formula company marketing can also be misleading. “It’s not really a surprise that you’ve got confused patients and, frankly, a lot of very confused doctors.”

Fox is the lead author of the International Milk Allergy in Primary Care, or iMAP, guidelines, one of many similar documents intended to help physicians diagnose CMPA. But some guidelines, including iMAP — which was known as the Milk Allergy in Primary Care Guideline until 2017 — have been criticized for listing a broad range of symptoms, like colic, non-specific rashes, diarrhea, and constipation, which can be common in healthy infants during the first year of their life.

“Lots of babies cry, or they posset, or they get a little minor rash or something,” said Michael Perkin, a pediatric allergist based in the U.K. “But that doesn’t mean they’ve got a pathological process going on.”

In a paper published online in December 2021, Perkin and colleagues found that in a food allergy trial, nearly three-quarters of the infants’ parents reported at least two symptoms that matched iMAP guideline’s “mild-moderate” non-IgE-mediated cow’s milk allergy symptoms, such as vomiting or reflux. But another study led by Perkin and Robert Boyle, a children’s allergy specialist at Imperial College London, reviewed available evidence and found that only about 1 percent of babies have a milk allergy proven by what’s called a “food challenge,” in which a person is exposed to the allergen and their reactions are monitored.

That same study found that up to 14 percent of families believe their babies have a milk allergy. Meanwhile, another study by Boyle and colleagues showed that milk allergy formula prescriptions increased 2.8-fold in England from 2007 to 2018. Researchers at the University of Rochester found similar trends stateside: Between 2017 and 2019, hypoallergenic formula sales rose from 4.9 percent to 7.6 percent of all formula sold in the U.S.

Perkin and Boyle suspect the formula industry has influenced diagnosis guidelines. In their 2020 report, which was published in JAMA Pediatrics, they found that 81 percent of authors who wrote nine physicians’ guidelines for the condition — including the 2013 version of the iMAP guidelines — reported a conflict of interest with formula manufacturers, such as research funding, consulting fees, or paid lectures.

Additionally, the formula industry sends representatives and promotional materials to some pediatric clinics. One recent study found that around 85 percent of pediatricians surveyed reported a representative visit, sometimes sponsoring meals.

Formula companies “like people getting the idea that whenever a baby cries, or does a runny poo, or anything,” that it might be a milk allergy, Boyle said.

In response to criticism that the guidelines have influenced the increase in specialized formula sales, Fox noted that the rise began in the early 2000s. One of the first diagnosis guidelines, meanwhile, was published in 2007. He also said that the symptoms listed in the iMAP guidelines were taken from the U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the U.S.’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

As for the conflicts of interest, Fox said: “We never made any money from this, there was never any money for the development of it. We’ve done this with best intentions, we absolutely recognize where that may not have turned out the way that we intended it, we’d have tried our best to address that.”

Following backlash over close ties between the formula industry and healthcare professionals, including author conflicts of interest, iMAP updated their guidelines in 2019. The new version responded directly to criticism and said the guidelines received no direct industry funding, but acknowledged “a potential risk of unconscious bias” related to research funding, educational grants, and consultant fees. The authors noted that the new guidelines tried to mitigate such influence through independent patient input.

Fox also said he ceased all formula ties in 2018, and led the British Society for Allergy & Clinical Immunology to do the same when he was president.

Undark reached out to the Infant Nutrition Council of America, an association of the largest U.S. manufacturers of infant formula, multiple times, but did not receive any comment in response.

Though the guidelines have issues, said Nigel Rollins, a pediatrician and researcher at the World Health Organization, he sees the rise in diagnoses as driven by formula industry marketing to parents, which can fuel the idea that fussiness or colic might be signs of a milk allergy. Parents then go to their pediatrician to talk about milk allergy, Rollins said, and “the family doctor isn’t actually well-positioned to argue otherwise.”

Rollins led much of the research in the 2022 report from WHO and UNICEF, which surveyed more than 8,500 pregnant and postpartum people in eight countries (not including the U.S.). Of those participants, 51 percent were exposed to aggressive formula milk marketing, which the report states “represents one of the most underappreciated risks to infants and young children’s health.”

Meanwhile, Amy Burris, a pediatric allergist and immunologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said there are many likely causes of overdiagnosis. “I don’t know that there’s one particular thing that stands out in my head as the reason it’s overdiagnosed,” she added.

Some physicians rely on their own criteria for diagnosing non-IgE milk allergy, rather than the guidelines — for instance, conducting a test that detects microscopic blood in stool. But Burris and Rollins both pointed out that healthy infants, or infants who have recently had a virus or stomach bug, can have traces of blood in their stool, too.

Martin, the allergy researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the better way to confirm an infant dairy allergy is to reintroduce milk around a month after it has been eliminated: If the symptoms reappear, then the baby most likely has the allergy. The guidelines say to do this, but both Martin and Perkin told Undark that this almost never happens; parents can be reluctant to reintroduce a food if their baby seems better without it.

“I wish every physician followed the guidelines right now until we write better guidelines, because, unequivocally, what folks are doing not following the guidelines is worse,” Martin said, adding that kids are on a restricted diet for a longer time than they should be.

Giving up potentially allergenic foods, including dairy, isn’t without consequences. “I think there’s a lot of potential risk in having moms unnecessarily avoid cow’s milk or other foods,” Burris said. “Also, you’re putting the breastfeeding relationship at risk.”

By the time Burris sees a baby, she said, their mother has often already given up breastfeeding after a primary care provider suggested a food allergy, but “at that point, it’s too late to restimulate the supply.” It also remains an open question whether allergens in breast milk actually trigger infant allergies. According to Perkin, the amount of cow’s milk protein that enters breast milk is “tiny.”

For babies, Martin said, dietary elimination may affect sensitivity to other foods. She pointed to research indicating that early introduction of food allergens such as peanuts can reduce the likelihood of developing allergies.

Martin also said some babies with a CMPA diagnosis may not have to give up milk entirely. She led a 2020 study suggesting that even when parents don’t elect to make any dietary changes for babies with a non-IgE-mediated food allergy diagnosis, they later report an improvement in their babies’ symptoms. But when parents do make changes to their baby’s diet, in Martin’s experience, if they later reintroduce milk, “the vast majority of them do fine,” she said. “I think some people would argue that maybe you had the wrong diagnosis initially. But I think the other possibility is that it’s the right diagnosis, it just turns around pretty fast.”

Still, many parents who give up dairy, or switch to a hypoallergenic formula, report an improvement in their baby’s symptoms. Arnold said her son’s symptoms improved when they eliminated dairy. But when he was about eight months old, they reintroduced the food group to his diet, and he had no issues.

Whether that’s because the cow’s milk protein allergy was short-lived or because his symptoms were due to something else, it’s unclear. But she sees moms self-diagnosing their baby with food allergies on social media and believes many are experiencing a placebo effect when they say their baby improves. “Nobody’s immune to that. Even me,” she said. “There’s absolutely a chance that that was the case with my baby.”

Christina Szalinski is a freelance science writer with a Ph.D. in cell biology based near Philadelphia.

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Maybe it starts with a low-energy feeling, or maybe you’re getting a little cranky. You might have a headache or difficulty concentrating. Your brain is sending you a message: You’re hungry. Find food.

Studies in mice have pinpointed a cluster of cells called AgRP neurons near the underside of the brain that may create this unpleasant hungry, even “hangry,” feeling. They sit near the brain’s blood supply, giving them access to hormones arriving from the stomach and fat tissue that indicate energy levels. When energy is low, they act on a variety of other brain areas to promote feeding.

By eavesdropping on AgRP neurons in mice, scientists have begun to untangle how these cells switch on and encourage animals to seek food when they’re low on nutrients, and how they sense food landing in the gut to turn back off. Researchers have also found that the activity of AgRP neurons goes awry in mice with symptoms akin to those of anorexia, and that activating these neurons can help to restore normal eating patterns in those animals.

Understanding and manipulating AgRP neurons might lead to new treatments for both anorexia and overeating. “If we could control this hangry feeling, we might be better able to control our diets,” says Amber Alhadeff, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

To eat or not to eat

AgRP neurons appear to be key players in appetite: Deactivating them in adult mice causes the animals to stop eating — they may even die of starvation. Conversely, if researchers activate the neurons, mice hop into their food dishes and gorge themselves.

Experiments at several labs in 2015 helped to illustrate what AgRP neurons do. Researchers found that when mice hadn’t had enough to eat, AgRP neurons fired more frequently. But just the sight or smell of food — especially something yummy like peanut butter or a Hershey’s Kiss — was enough to dampen this activity, within seconds. From this, the scientists concluded that AgRP neurons cause animals to seek out food. Once food has been found, they stop firing as robustly.

One research team, led by neuroscientist Scott Sternson at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, also showed that AgRP neuron activity appears to make mice feel bad. To demonstrate this, the scientists engineered mice so that the AgRP neurons would start firing when light was shone into the brain with an optical fiber (the fiber still allowed the mice to move around freely). They placed these engineered mice in a box with two distinct areas: one colored black with a plastic grid floor, the other white with a soft, tissue paper floor. If the researchers activated AgRP neurons whenever the mice went into one of the two areas, the mice started avoiding that region.

Sternson, now at the University of California San Diego, concluded that AgRP activation felt “mildly unpleasant.” That makes sense in nature, he says: Any time a mouse leaves its nest, it’s at risk from predators, but it must overcome this fear in order to forage and eat. “These AgRP neurons are kind of the push that, in a dangerous environment, you’re going to go out and seek food to stay alive.”

Sternson’s 2015 study had shown that while the sight or smell of food quiets AgRP neurons, it’s only temporary: Activity goes right back up if the mouse can’t follow through and eat the snack. Through additional experiments, Alhadeff and colleagues discovered that what turns the AgRP neurons off more reliably is calories landing in the gut.

First, Alhadeff’s team fed mice a calorie-free treat: a gel with artificial sweetener. When mice ate the gel, AgRP neuron activity dropped, as expected — but only temporarily. As the mice learned there were no nutrients to be gained from this snack, their AgRP neurons responded less and less to each bite. Thus, as animals learn whether a treat really nourishes them, the neurons adjust the hunger dial accordingly.

Next, the team used a catheter implanted through the abdomen to deliver calories, in the form of the nutritional drink Ensure, directly to the stomach. This bypassed any sensory cues that food was coming. And it resulted in a longer dip in AgRP activity. In other words, it’s the nutrients in food that shut off AgRP neurons for an extended time after a meal, Alhadeff concluded.

Alhadeff has since begun to decode the messages that the stomach sends to the AgRP neurons, and found that it depends on the nutrient. Fat in the gut triggers a signal via the vagus nerve, which reaches from the digestive tract to the brain. The simple sugar glucose signals the brain via nerves in the spinal cord.

Her team is now investigating why these multiple paths exist. She hopes that by better understanding how AgRP neurons drive food-seeking, scientists can eventually come up with ways to help people keep off unhealthy pounds. Though scientists and dieters have been seeking such treatments for more than a century, it’s been difficult to identify easy, safe and effective treatments. The latest class of weight-loss medications, such as Wegovy, act in part on AgRP neurons but have unpleasant side effects such as nausea and diarrhea.

Therapies targeting AgRP neurons alone would likely fail to fully solve the weight problem, because food-seeking is only one component of appetite control, says Sternson, who reviewed the main controllers of appetite in the Annual Review of Physiology in 2017. Other brain areas that sense satiety and make high-calorie food pleasurable also play important roles, he says. That’s why, for example, you eat that slice of pumpkin pie at the end of the Thanksgiving meal, even though you’re already full of turkey and mashed potatoes.

Outflanking anorexia

The flip side of overeating is anorexia, and there, too, researchers think that investigating AgRP neurons could lead to new treatment strategies. People with anorexia avoid food, to the point of dangerous weight loss. “Eating food is actually aversive,” says Ames Sutton Hickey, a neuroscientist at Temple University in Philadelphia. There is no medication specific for anorexia; treatment may include psychotherapy, general medications such as antidepressants and, in the most severe cases, force-feeding via a tube threaded through the nose. People with anorexia are also often restless or hyperactive and may exercise excessively.

Researchers can study the condition using a mouse model of the disease known as activity-based anorexia, or ABA. When scientists limit the food available to the mice and provide them with a wheel to run on, some mice enter an anorexia-like state, eating less than they’re offered, and running on the wheel even during daylight, when mice are normally inactive. “It’s a remarkable addictive thing that happens to these animals,” says Tamas Horvath, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine. “They basically get a kick out of not eating and exercising.”

It’s not a perfect model for anorexia. Mice, presumably, face none of the social pressures to stay thin that humans do; conversely, people with anorexia usually don’t have limits on their access to food. But it’s one of the best anorexia mimics out there, says Alhadeff: “I think it’s as good as we get.”

To find out how AgRP neurons might be involved in anorexia, Sutton Hickey carefully monitored the food intake of ABA mice. She compared them to mice that were given a restricted diet, but had a locked exercise wheel and didn’t develop ABA. The ABA mice, she found, ate fewer meals than the other mice. And when they did eat, their AgRP activity didn’t decrease like it should have after they filled their tummies. Something was wrong with the way the neurons responded to hunger and food cues.

Sutton Hickey also found that she could fix the problem when she engineered ABA mice so that AgRP neurons would spring into action when researchers injected a certain chemical. These mice, when treated with the chemical, ate more meals and gained weight. “That speaks very much to the importance of these neurons,” says Horvath, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It shows that these neurons are good guys, not the bad guys.”

Sutton Hickey says the next step is to figure out why the AgRP neurons respond abnormally in ABA mice. She hopes there might be some key molecule she could target with a drug to help people with anorexia.

All in all, the work on AgRP neurons is giving scientists a much better picture of why we eat when we do — as well as new leads, perhaps, to medications that might help people change disordered eating, be it consuming too much or too little, into healthy habits.

10.1146/knowable-052423-1

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Rice cereal is a staple in many American babies’ diets, and is often the first solid food an infant eats. In recent years, however, it has also become one of many baby foods that has been raising alarm among lawmakers and parents.

Most cultivated rice grows submerged in paddy fields, primarily in South and Southeast Asia, although it is also grown in the United States and many other countries. These flooded fields provide a cool, fertile environment for a healthy crop, but that same environment also allows contamination from toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury.

At least some heavy metals appear to harm brain development and cognition; and have also been linked to ailments including lung disease, kidney disease, skin lesions, and cancer. Heavy metal exposure is especially dangerous for infants because, compared to adults, they eat more food relative to their body weight and their diet is less varied. Babies are also particularly sensitive to the toxic effects of heavy metals because their bodies are still developing.

In February 2021, the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy released a report on heavy metals in baby food produced by several of the country’s largest manufacturers. The 59-page document ended with a call for immediate action from the Food and Drug Administration. Two months later, the FDA announced the Closer to Zero initiative, which uses an iterative approach to reduce heavy metal exposure among babies and children. The FDA issued draft guidance on lead in fruit and vegetable juice in April 2022 and in baby food more broadly in January 2023. Action plans for arsenic, cadmium, and mercury aren’t scheduled to be completed until 2024 at the earliest.

In the meantime, botanists, soil chemists, and plant geneticists — who have long worked to reduce heavy metals in the food supply — continue to look for potential solutions, from new land management practices to nano-sized fertilizers to genetic engineering. Not all of these technologies are available yet; however, even when they are, eliminating heavy metals entirely won’t be easy.

Still, some experts are optimistic about the possibilities. While “there is no single magic bullet that can address this problem,” said Om Parkash Dhankher, a professor of crop biotechnology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, “there are lots of technologies and practices that farmers can use.”

Heavy metals are naturally present in the Earth’s crust and make their way into aquifers and rivers when water travels through underground rock formations and dissolves the toxic elements. Arsenic, for example, exists in high levels in the groundwater of the U.S., China, and India. Agricultural practices have also contributed to heavy metal contamination. The U.S. has led the world in the use of arsenic for agriculture and industry, and while insecticides with lead and arsenic were banned in the 1980s, soil, paddy water, and rice grains still have detectable levels of the toxins.

These contaminants get sucked up by the roots of a rice plant, which absorb nutrients through proteins in their cell walls. According to Parkash, arsenic essentially “hijacks” these pathways. As the plant grows, arsenic travels from the roots into the leaves and grains.

Scientists including Parkash are looking for ways to stop arsenic from hijacking the plants to begin with. One approach is to apply more sulfur to paddy soils, which can bind to toxic metals and make them more difficult to absorb.

Heavy metal exposure is especially dangerous for infants because, compared to adults, they eat more food relative to their body weight and their diet is less varied.

In recent years, Parkash and Jason White, who directs the ​​Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, have been researching this process at a very small scale. Given how sulfur binds to toxic metals, Parkash and White have looked into ways that nanotechnology — which involves manipulating materials at the scale of billionths of a meter — could be used for soil remediation. In a recent paper, they found that rice plants treated with both inorganic arsenic, the element’s more toxic form, and nanosulfur accumulated nearly a third less of the toxin in root tissue than plants exposed to inorganic arsenic alone.

Other alterations to a field can help, too. Wild plants like water spinach and water celery also slurp up nutrients and toxins, and scientists have studied intercropping rice paddies to help remove contaminants. When these aquatic vegetables are grown alongside rice, overall concentrations of arsenic in the soil decrease and the wild plants absorb the arsenic. Certain species of bacteria can tolerate high levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, and cadmium, and some bacteria have been found to mitigate the toxic effects these heavy metals have on plants. Other microorganisms can reduce arsenic concentrations in crops. Scientists have also genetically engineered bacteria to produce a specific protein that boosts their ability to break down arsenic.

Some of these approaches have yet to be applied in large-scale interventions beyond the lab. “Scientists don’t even think about extension,” said Ganga Hettiarachchi, a soil and environmental chemistry scientist at Kansas State University, referring to a century-old partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and land-grant universities to translate science for practical application in farms and food production. When it comes to the newest research on soil and land management, Hettiarachchi worries that farmers might not be aware of how to apply the latest research. But she is optimistic: “I do see that it’s changing.”

Some research on heavy metals in rice can’t yet be applied in the field though. Genetic engineering of rice itself, to help the plant block heavy metals, has proven difficult, Shannon Pinson, a plant geneticist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, told Undark. There is no genetically modified rice in commercial production in the U.S., although Pinson said that the technology has been a useful research tool for understanding how plants take up heavy metals. For example, her research suggests arsenic accumulation is not controlled by a single gene, but rather many genes with individually small effects.

Not all rice varieties are the same, though, and some take up more arsenic and heavy metals than others. In a 2015 article, Pinson’s team examined 1,763 rice cultivars from around the world and compared concentrations of both organic and inorganic arsenic at different stages in the growing cycle. The good news, according to Pinson, is that the genes responsible for limiting the uptake of both forms of arsenic are already present in U.S. cultivars. But that means that the plants are likely already reducing the arsenic as much as they can, she added, and it “will not be easy to find additional genes that would further reduce arsenic in U.S. rice varieties through traditional breeding.”

One challenge in tinkering with soil chemistry and plant genetics is blocking arsenic can affect the way a plant takes up other nutrients. “There is a balance between this, a tradeoff between the required nutrients and these toxic elements,” Parkash said. “It’s a very complex system.”

The tradeoff between nutrients and heavy metals plays out beyond the paddy field, and when it comes to setting rules around food, exposure to toxins is not the only consideration.

In recent guidance for arsenic in infant rice cereal, and for lead in baby food more broadly, the FDA notes that strict limits may not be possible for manufacturers. Pinson told Undark that although it is possible to produce rice with relatively low levels of arsenic, supply chain realities make it difficult to achieve low levels in rice-based baby foods, in part because sellers merge grains from multiple truckloads from different farms into single bins, making low-arsenic rice difficult to trace.

The manufacturing process can also increase concentrations in baby food products that make it on the shelf. The February 2021 Economic and Consumer Policy Subcommittee report found that, at least in tests from of one company’s products, inorganic arsenic levels were 28 to 93 percent higher in the finished products compared to ingredients. The report points to high levels of arsenic in additives — like vitamin mixes and spices — as the cause of the spike pre- and post-manufacturing.

If food companies can’t meet limits on heavy metals in their products, Elisabeth Davis, a spokesperson for the FDA, told Undark that there could be unintended economic consequences for consumers. This includes, she continued, “limiting access to foods that have significant nutritional benefits by making them unavailable or unaffordable for many families, or unintentionally increasing the presence of one environmental contaminant when foods are reformulated to reduce the presence of another.”

In March 2016, the FDA released a risk assessment that compared economic impacts and the lifetime risk of cancer at various potential guidance levels for arsenic. The risk assessment compared the effect of different parts per billion (ppb) limits — which is not a unit of mass, but a description of a ratio. For example, adding about half of a teaspoon of salt to an Olympic-size swimming pool would make it 1 ppb salt. While a 100-ppb limit could lead to anywhere from a 4 to 93 percent loss of rice in the food supply, the FDA calculated that a 75-ppb limit could lead to a 14 to 99 percent loss.

The FDA’s risk assessment estimated the average lifetime risk of cancer at different levels of infant rice consumption at various limits of inorganic arsenic. For white rice infant cereal, a limit of 100 parts per billion would reduce the risk of cancer by almost 19 percent, whereas limits of 75 and 50 ppb were calculated to reduce risk by 41 and 79 percent, respectively.

The hazard models the report’s authors used are a standard approach, but experts told Undark that the science of calculating health risks around heavy metal contamination is complex. While it is quite straightforward to calculate exposure from water, when it comes to food, White, from the ​​Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station said: “There isn’t a formula right now that could be used to actually calculate something like that.”

In the end, the FDA recommended inorganic arsenic limits at 100 parts per billion, which it first proposed in draft guidance in April 2016 and finalized in August 2020. This is more lenient than the 10 ppb proposed by national lawmakers in the Baby Food Safety Act, a bill that has stalled in Congress since March 2021. The act would align the inorganic arsenic limits in food with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for drinking water, though the 100-ppb limit in food is below the voluntary standards set by the leading international food standards body, the Codex Alimentarius.

Like all of the FDA’s guidelines on food limits, 100 parts per billion of arsenic in infant rice cereal is just a recommendation, not a legal requirement. But some evidence suggests the change might be working. The FDA points to a slight downward trend in average concentrations of arsenic in infant rice cereal since it first issued the draft guidance.

However, recent investigations by Consumer Reports and the advocacy group Healthy Babies Bright Futures suggest that at least some baby food in stores across the U.S. contains more than 100 ppb of arsenic — four of seven infant rice cereals that were tested exceeded the FDA’s limit. The February 2021 report, along with a follow-up report issued that September, showed that several companies set internal limits on arsenic above the FDA’s guidance. And some companies found that arsenic levels in infant cereal still surpassed their higher limits.

“Baby food manufacturers hold a special position of public trust. Consumers believe that they would not sell unsafe products. Consumers also believe that the federal government would not knowingly permit the sale of unsafe baby food,” the report read. Baby food manufacturers and federal regulators had “broken the faith.”

Despite evidence of arsenic in infant rice cereal above 100 ppb, there was no FDA-mandated recall. Instead, some companies voluntarily pulled products from the shelves. In June 2021, Beech-Nut announced it was leaving the market for rice cereal entirely.

Potential sources of exposure to heavy metals go far beyond the products covered by Closer to Zero. The FDA has no standards for heavy metals in foods beyond the action level for arsenic in infant rice cereal and two draft guidance levels for lead in juice and baby food more broadly. And while processed foods can be systematically tested for heavy metals, Hettiarachchi’s research has shown that even individual and community gardens can also be contaminated, meaning that the risk of exposure remains even with homemade food.

As for the FDA efforts on reducing heavy metal exposure so far, “it’s good, and I fully support getting closer to zero,” Hettiarachchi said. “But at the same time, I think we have to do much better.”

Colleen Wood is a writer and educator based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, New Lines Magazine, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. Find her on Twitter @colleenwood_.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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New guidance from the World Health Organization (WHO) says to avoid using sugar substitutes if you are trying to lose weight. Some common non-sugar sweeteners (NSS) include aspartame, saccharin, sucralose, stevia, among others. These substances are found in a wide range of products including diet sodas and most items labeled “sugar free.” They’re often used to replace full sugar drinks and snacks during diets.

[Related: Popular artificial sweetener associated with risk of heart attack and stroke.]

Consuming non-sugar sweeteners, “does not confer any long-term benefit in reducing body fat in adults or children,” according to systematic review of available literature by the WHO. 

Additionally, there may be “potential undesirable effects” from long-term use of sugar substitutes, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. 

“Replacing free sugars with NSS does not help with weight control in the long term. People need to consider other ways to reduce free sugars intake, such as consuming food with naturally occurring sugars, like fruit, or unsweetened food and beverages,” WHO Director for Nutrition and Food Safety Francesco Branca said in a statement. “NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health.”

The new recommendation applies to all people except those with pre-existing diabetes. It does not apply to products like toothpaste, skin cream, and medications that contain some non-sugar substitutes or to low-calorie sugars called polyols. 

The WHO reviewed 283 studies and two randomized controlled trials that are considered the gold standard of research into the subjects. 

The randomized trials found non-sugar sweeteners had a low impact on reducing both calorie intake and body weight compared to sugar. They also didn’t see any change in glucose and insulin levels which are  intermediate markers of diabetes.

While observational studies show associations, but not cause and effect, the reviewed research found a low impact on fat tissue and body weight and no change in calorie intake. They did find a low increase in the risk of high blood pressure, strokee, type-2 diabetes, heart disease, and death from heart disease, according to the WHO.  A very low risk for bladder cancer and early death was also found. 

[Related: High-fructose corn syrup vs. sugar: Which is actually worse?]

Stevia products are often considered to be a more natural artificial sweetener since they are derived from the stevia plant, but bulking sugars are often added to artificial sweeteners. One sugar agent called erythritol is used to add bulk or sweetened stevia, monk fruit and keto reduced-sugar products. In February, a study published in the journal Nature found that erythritol has been linked to blood clotting, heart attack, stroke, and death.

“Sweeteners like erythritol have rapidly increased in popularity in recent years but there needs to be more in-depth research into their long-term effects,” said senior author Stanley Hazen, chairman for the Department of Cardiovascular & Metabolic Sciences in Lerner Research Institute and co-section head of Preventive Cardiology at Cleveland Clinic, in a statement. “Cardiovascular disease builds over time, and heart disease is the leading cause of death globally. We need to make sure the foods we eat aren’t hidden contributors.”

According to the WHO, this new recommendation was “conditional” since this identified link between sweeteners and disease outcomes might be influenced by more complex patterns of sweetener use and other patterns by the study participants.

In response, an industry group representing makers of non-sugar substitutes called the  International Sweeteners Association told CNN, “it is a disservice to not recognise the public health benefits of low/no calorie sweeteners and is disappointed that the WHO’s conclusions are largely based on low certainty evidence from observational studies, which are at high risk of reverse causality.”

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An experimental “peanut patch” is showing some promise for toddlers who are highly allergic to peanuts. The patch, called Viaskin, was tested on children ages one to three for a late-stage trial, and the results show that the patch helped children whose bodies could not tolerate even a small piece of peanuts safely eat a few. The findings were published May 10 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

[Related: Feeding Peanuts To High-Risk Infants Could Prevent Allergy Development.]

Peanut allergies are a common and dangerous food allergy that affects about 2.5 percent of children in the United States. In children with allergies, their immune system overreacts to peanut-containing foods, which triggers everything from hives, to wheezing, to airway obstruction that can lead children hospitalized or worse. About 20 percent of these children will outgrow the allergy over time, but the majority must avoid peanuts for the rest of their lives. Additionally, they must carry rescue medication in the form of an injectable epinephrine divide like an EpiPen to prevent a severe allergic reaction if peanuts are accidentally eaten.

Peanut products and traces of peanuts can be found in a surprising number of foods: from candies to dipping sauces to ice cream. There is currently no cure for such an allergy. The only treatment is a peanut powder that protects against a severe reaction in children over 4 years-old. First approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2020, the “oral immunotherapy” called Palforzia is consumed daily by children ages four to 17 to keep up their protection. It is now being tested in children under age four. 

France’s DBV Technologies, makers of the new patch, is pursuing this skin-based immunotherapy treatment as an alternative way to desensitize the body and on younger children. 

The trial of this new patch included 362 toddlers from eight countries. 244 of them were randomly assigned to receive the Viaskin patch. The patch contains 250 micrograms of peanut protein which is the equivalent of roughly 1/1000th of one peanut. 118 children received a placebo patch. They wore the patches every day for a year before undergoing screening.

After one year, two-thirds of the children who used the patch and one-third of the placebo group met the trial’s primary endpoint. The participants with a less sensitive peanut allergy could safely tolerate the peanut protein equivalent of eating three or four peanuts. Children who were more sensitive to peanut proteins could tolerate the equivalent of consuming one peanut.

If more patch testing works out, “this would fill a huge unmet need,” Matthew Greenhawt, an allergist at Children’s Hospital Colorado who helped lead the study told the Associated Press. 

[Related: I hardly ever use my Nima allergen sensor. I’m still glad I bought it.]

Almost all of the participants did have some adverse events, most commonly reactions at the application site like swelling, itching, and redness. Serious events were reported in 21 children who had the Viaskin patch and three that were in the placebo group. Anaphylaxis–a very dangerous allergic reaction–was reported in 7.8 percent of the patch recipients and 3.4 percent of the placebo group. The parents of eight participants pulled their children from the study due to the adverse events. 

The study does have several limitations including that young children with a history of severe allergic reactions were excluded due to safety concerns. Additionally, there was a lack of racial diversity among the study’s participants.

“Peanut allergy can be very substantially reduced if peanut is introduced into the diet as early as 4 to 6 months of age,” Alkis Togias of the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wrote in an editorial published alongside the study. “Toddlers are of particular interest since their immune systems have plasticity that can theoretically allow for higher efficacy and longer-lasting benefits from allergen immunotherapy after therapy is discontinued.”

Togias also cited that skin patches may be less protective, but have a better safety profile compared to an oral medication, but still said that the findings, “are very good news for toddlers and their families as the next step toward a future with more treatments for food allergies.”

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Behold the microscopic power of cheese. The dairy product has been a dietary staple for generations, but it is also helping microbiologists better understand nature’s microbiomes. In a study published May 10 in the journal mBio, a team of researchers used cheese rinds to demonstrate how fungal antibiotics can influence how microbiomes develop. 

[Related: Beehives are the honeypot for a city’s microbial secrets.]

Metabolites produced by fungi can improve human health. Some secrete penicillin, which is then purified and used as an antibiotic. For this study, scientists set out to better understand how fungi interact with the microbes living alongside them in microbial communities, with a particular focus on how fungi and bacteria’s relationship.

“My lab is interested in how fungi shape the diversity of microbial communities where they live. Fungi are widespread in many microbial ecosystems, from soils to our own bodies, but we know much less about their diversity and roles in microbiomes compared to more widely studied bacteria,” co-author and Tufts University microbiologist Benjamin Wolfe said in a statement. “To study the ecology of fungi and their interactions with bacteria, we use cheese rinds as a model microbial ecosystem to understand these basic biology questions.

Cheese rinds themselves are microbial communities that form on the surfaces of naturally aged cheeses like brie, taleggio, and some types of cheddar. As the cheeses age, fuzzy and sometimes sticky layers of microbes form on the surfaces of the cheese. The microbes slowly decompose as the cheeses curd and they grow on the surface to create the aromas and colors that give the cheese in the fancy part of the grocery store their more unique properties. 

Wolfe and his team began by investigating a cheesemaker’s problem with mold spreading on the surface of the cheeses and disrupting the normal development of the rind. This causes the cheese to look like the rinds were disappearing as the mold invaded their cheese cave. They collaborated with microbiologist Nancy Keller’s lab at the University of Wisconsin to find out what this mold was doing to the rind microbes and what chemicals the mold may be producing that disrupted the rind. 

They researchers first deleted a gene (laeA) in the Penicillium mold that can control the expression of chemicals that fungi can secrete into their environment. These compounds are called specialized or secondary metabolites. 

“We know that many fungi can produce metabolites that are antibiotics because we have used these as drugs for humans, but we know surprisingly little about how fungal antibiotics work in nature,” said Wolfe. “Do fungi actually use these compounds to kill other microbes? How do these antibiotics produced by fungi affect the development of bacterial communities? We added our normal and our laeA-deleted Penicillium to a community of cheese rind bacteria to see whether deleting laeA caused changes in how the community of bacteria developed.” 

[Related: You might be overusing hand sanitizer.]

When laeA was deleted, most of the antibacterial activity of the Penicillium mold was lost. This discovery helped the team narrow down specific regions of the fungal genome that could produce antibacterial compounds. They narrowed it down to one class of compounds called pseurotins. The metabolites are produced by multiple types of fungi and that can modulate the immune system, kill insects, and inhibit bacteria. 

The study showed that pseurotins can also control how bacterial communities living with that fungi grow and develop. The pseurotins are strongly antibacterial, which means they inhibit some of the bacteria found in artisanal cheeses including Staphylococcus, Brevibacterium, Brachybacterium, and Psychrobacter. This process caused a shift in the cheese rind microbiome’s composition.

It also shows that the antibiotics secreted by fungi can control how microbiomes develop, since the metabolites are in other ecosystems, including the human human microbiome and soil ecosystems. The team expects that these mechanisms of fungal-bacterial interactions are likely very widespread. 

“Our results suggest that some pesky mold species in artisan cheeses may disrupt normal cheese development by deploying antibiotics,” said Wolfe. “These findings allow us to work with cheesemakers to identify which molds are the bad ones and how to manage them in their cheese caves. It also helps us appreciate that every time we eat artisan cheese, we are consuming the metabolites that microbes use to compete and cooperate in communities.”

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There’s been a real uptick in gluten-free labels at the grocery store, including on drinks and snacks you know shouldn’t have any gluten to begin with. But if you’ve made fun of gluten-free oats, you might want to take back that joke.

Oats are naturally gluten-free, but research suggests the vast majority of the bags you see in supermarket aisles have high enough levels to poison someone with celiac disease. Not many people have any idea why this is, but now that we’re squeezing milk out of our oats, it might pay to know a little more about this mysterious association between oats and gluten.

1. Grains that naturally have it (i.e. wheat, barley, and rye), plus anything derived from those grains that’s not specifically processed to remove the gluten (some food in Europe is sold with gluten-free wheat starch, for instance, which has the gluten taken out).
2. Foods that shouldn’t have gluten, but end up contaminated at some point in their production.

[Related: Is corn a fruit, vegetable, or grain?]

Oats fall into the second category, mostly because they’re often grown alongside or in rotation with wheat, then processed on machinery shared with gluten-containing grains. For the vast majority of farmers, this isn’t a problem. If a few wheat seeds (or rye or barley seeds) get into your oats, they won’t have a huge impact on the final product’s taste or texture, especially if that lot is destined to become flour. This can occur with oat-derived food items as well, including rolled oats, instant oatmeal, and oat milk, meaning they aren’t always gluten-free.

Can gluten in oats trigger an allergy?

It’s easy to feel like people are just being overly dramatic about gluten contamination. What’s one bit of barley in a whole field of oats?

But if you have celiac disease, that one little gluten-containing seed matters a lot. The limit to call something “gluten-free” in the US is 20 parts per million (ppm) of gluten to total product. That means for every million oat granules, you have to have less than 20 gluten-containing grains.

That’s why studies analyzing the gluten in standard commercial oats have consistently found they’re not safe for celiacs. One 2022 study focused on oat flour, rolled oats, and instant oats with gluten-free labels found contamination in up to 40 percent of the samples. Another looking specifically at unlabeled Canadian oats (many of which make their way to the US), found gluten in 88 percent of the 133 samples tested. That means if you’re really sensitive to gluten or you have celiac disease, you can’t trust any oats, even if it has the “gluten-free” branding.

Are there any real gluten-free oats?

To eliminate those gluten-containing seeds, producers either have to sort them out or grow the oats in their own separate field, and in both cases, the rest of the oat processing has to be done on dedicated machines in buildings that never see any glutinous grains. That means most of the oats produced in America have some gluten in them—it’s just too time-consuming and expensive for most growers to bother.

More manufacturers have started producing gluten-free oats, but there’s a lot of discussion within the celiac community about just how safe each of the two methods are. Most of the large manufacturers, like Bob’s Red Mill and General Mills, use a mechanical (also called optical) sorting method to physically remove contaminants from the oat supply. Some people with celiac argue that’s not good enough because the sorting simply isn’t sufficiently thorough.

[Related: These are the most common allergies (and the deadliest)]

You’ve probably never seen a wheat seed—it’s almost always processed into flour first—but they look a lot like oats, as do rye and barley seeds. That makes them very challenging to sift out using a machine. Manufacturers get their gluten-free certification by analyzing roughly 20 samples, then averaging the results together, but that can mean that some lots have gluten above the 20 ppm mark. As long as the average is low enough, the manufacturer still passes the test.

That said, lots of manufacturers may not have that issue—all of their samples may be under the limit. You just can’t know that for sure. Many celiacs eat gluten-free oats with no problems, but if you’re worried about it, you can choose to only eat oats that have been produced under the purity protocol, which involves growing them entirely separately from any grains containing gluten (you can see a list of those manufacturers on the independent, consumer-focused Gluten Free Watchdog website). It’s all a matter of just how safe you want to play it.

Oats are a surprisingly complicated issue, but if you can work them into your diet they’re an excellent source of whole grain fiber—and everyone could use a little more of that.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on December 10, 2019.

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General Mills has voluntarily recalled select bags of Gold Medal flour due to possible salmonella contamination. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the recall on April 28 and covers two, five, and 10 pound bags of Gold Medal bleached and unbleached all-purpose flour with a “better if used by” date of March 27, 2024, or March 28, 2024. 

[Related: How do you track a salmonella outbreak? A data journalist followed the DNA trail to slaughterhouses.]

Other types of Gold Medal flour are not affected by the recall. Still, General Mills advised consumers to check their pantries and throw out any flour covered in the recall. The current recall did not link the flour to any reports of illness, but salmonella was detected in a sample from the five pound product.  

“We are continuing to educate consumers that flour is not a ‘ready to eat’ ingredient. Anything made with flour must be cooked or baked before eating,” General Mills spokesperson Mollie Wulff said in a statement to CNN. 

While the recall has not linked General Mills flour to any reports of illness, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been investigating an 11-state salmonella outbreak. The majority of the 13 individuals sickened had reported eating raw batter or dough made with flour before getting sick. While most people infected recover, the most recent outbreak has resulted in three hospitalizations.

Salmonella is a bacterium that is found in the intestinal tracts of animals, and can be transferred to humans if animal feces enters into the food supply. It affects 1.35 million people each year, according to the CDC. Some symptoms of a salmonella infection include fever, stomach cramps, and diarrhea that can start within days of consuming the bacteria. Most people will recover with proper treatment, but consumers should seek medical treatment immediately if severe and persistent symptoms occur or there are signs of dehydration. Children under the age of five, those with weakened immune systems, and the elderly are more likely to have severe infections.

[Related: A salmonella outbreak has hit 37 states, and onions are to blame.]

According to both the FDA and CDC, consumers should not eat any raw products made with flour. Salmonella bacteria is killed by heat through baking, frying, sautéing, or boiling products that are made with flour, and people can get sick when eating food that constrain raw flour. Raw dough used in crafts homemade modeling dough can also pose the same risk. 

To prevent illness, both agencies recommend thoroughly cleaning all surfaces, hands, and utensils with warm soapy water after contact with uncooked flour or dough. People with pets should be particularly mindful of avoiding cross contamination by cleaning out bowls and feeders frequently. 

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Beer is more than one of humanity’s most beloved beverages—it’s also one of its oldest. Recent archaeological discoveries date it back 13,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean. It was once considered so sacred that only women could brew it–until witchcraft accusations stopped that in its tracks. 

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

The origins of our favorite types of beers are also starting to come into focus with a fun combination of history and science. A study published April 27 in the journal FEMS Yeast Research reveals a possible origin story for lager beer, a light type of beer produced by bottom-fermenting yeast. It can be pale, dark, or amber in color and pairs well with shellfish, grilled pork, and spicy foods among others.

The research team used historical records, in tandem with evolution and genomics research, and believe that lager likely originated at the court brewery–or Hofbräuhaus–of Maximilian I, the elector of Bavaria.

Lager surpassed ale as the most common beer produced around the turn of the 20th century and over 150 billion liters of lager beer are sold annually around the world. However, the shift from ale to lager started centuries before when a new yeast species Saccharomyces pastorianus or “lager yeast,” popped up in Germany around the end of the Middle Ages. The new yeast was a hybrid species that was the product of mating of top-fermenting ale yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the cold-tolerant Saccharomyces eubayanus around the beginning of the 17th century. 

“Lager is a beer brewed at low temperatures using yeast that are described as bottom-fermenting,” study author and University of Cork microbiologist John Morrissey wrote in The Conversation. “Yeast are single-celled fungi used in brewing to convert maltose to alcohol and carbon dioxide, giving beer its booziness and fizz. They are either top- or bottom-fermenting.”

S. pastorianus is a bottom-fermenting lager yeast, and its origins have been “shrouded in mystery and controversy,” according to Morrissey. The assumption was that the hybrid yeast arose when traditional ale fermentation became contaminated with wild yeasts. However, the team on this study doubted this historic assumption, and used detailed analysis of Central European historical brewing records to dig in more. They discovered that “lager-style” bottom fermentation was actually happening in Bavaria 200 years before the hybrid S. pastorianus yeast was born.

The team believes that it was actually the top-fermenting ale yeast S. cerevisiae that contaminated a batch of beer brewed with the cold-tolerant S. eubayanus. They believe that the source of the contaminating yeast was a wheat brewery in the small Bavarian town of Schwarzach.

[Related: The key to tastier beer might be mutant yeast—with notes of banana.]

“Bottom fermentation originated in northern Bavaria. Not only was it common practice in this part of Germany, but the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot brewing regulations of 1516 only permitted bottom fermentation. Thus, from at least the 16th century onwards, Bavarian brown beer was produced by mixtures of different bottom-fermenting yeast species known as stellhefen,” wrote Morrissey.

However, in neighboring Bohemia, excellent wheat beer made with S. cerevisiae was made in huge quantities and imported into Bavaria. To limit the blow to the economy from these imports, Bavarian ruler Wilhelm IV gave Baron Hans VI von Degenberg a special privilege to brew and sell wheat beer in the border regions to Bohemia in 1548.

Maximilian I eventually took power in 1602, and he seized the wheat beer privilege himself and took over the von Degenbergs’ Schwarzach breweries. The team believes that it was in October 1602 that the yeast from the wheat brewery was brought to the court brewery in Munich where the hybridization took place and lager yeast S. pastorianus was born.

“This theory is consistent with published genetic evidence showing that the S. cerevisiae parent of S. pastorianus was closer to ones used to brew wheat beer than strains used for barley-based ale,” wrote Morrissey.

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Roughly 55,000 adult consumers in the United States  take popular chewy melatonin gummies to promote better sleep. But they may be getting a little more of the hormone than the label indicates. A study published April 25 as a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that 88 percent of tested supplements were mislabeled.

The study follows a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report from last year about an alarming surge of excessive pediatric infestations of melatonin over the past 10 years.

[Related: Yes, you can overdose on melatonin. Here’s how to use the sleep supplements safely.]

Melatonin is a hormone naturally produced deep within the brain in the pineal gland. It  is released into the bloodstream to regulate the body’s natural sleep cycles. Melatonin is considered a drug in some countries in the European Union, Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom, making it only available through a prescription. The US Food and Drug Administration considers melatonin a dietary supplement, but manufacturers are not required to receive FDA approval or provide safety data on melatonin products.

For this study, a team of researchers from Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts and the University of Mississippi tested 25 different supplements. According to the authors, the team selected the first 25 gummy melatonin products that displayed on the National Institutes of Health database for this study. The team dissolved the gummies and then measured the quantity of melatonin, cannabidiol (CBD), and other components in the supplements.

Most of the products tested had 20, 30, or 50 percent more melatonin than the quantity listed on the label. Four has less amounts of the hormone than promised, including one without any detectable levels of melatonin. 

Twenty-two were “inaccurately labeled,” meaning they contained 10 percent more or less than the amount of melatonin on the label. 

Five products listed CBD as an ingredient, but they all had slightly higher levels of CBD than indicated on the label. According to the FDA, “it is currently illegal to market CBD by adding it to a food or labeling it as a dietary supplement.”

[Related: The science behind our circadian rhythms, and why time changes mess them up.]

“One product contained 347 percent more melatonin than what was actually listed on the label of the gummies,” study co-author and professor of medicine at the Cambridge Health Alliance Pieter Cohen told CNN.

In response to the JAMA letter, Steve Mister, the president and chief executive of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, told The Washington Post that supplement companies are required to have “at least 100 percent of labeled dosage” in their products. “It’s not uncommon for companies to put in a little extra,” he added. “So, for instance, a melatonin product that’s labeled as 3 milligrams might put in 4 milligrams.” 

Melatonin was the most cited substance in calls about children to US poison control centers in 2020. Drowsiness, headaches, agitation, and increased bed-wetting or urination in the evening hours are all potential side effects of melatonin use in children. 

“It’s important, especially in kids, not to use melatonin until you’ve spoken with your pediatrician or your sleep doctor,” M. Adeel Rishi, a pulmonology, sleep medicine, and critical care specialist in Indiana and vice chair of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Public Safety Committee, told PopSci last July. “The dose recommended in children is significantly lower than what is recommended in adults, and if you take too much of anything you have an overdose. Although it’s come to attention really in the last couple of years, we know that cases of melatonin among children have been on an upswing even before the pandemic.”

Other pediatric sleep experts stress the importance of good sleep hygiene and habits before starting melatonin. The new study’s letter also included a warning to parents that giving the gummies to children could result “in ingestion of unpredictable quantities” of melatonin.

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Today is a very special holiday where a skunky smell permeates the air. If you’re celebrating 4/20, Popular Science has the perfect lineup of dope science stories to make you everyone’s favorite bud. Don’t puff puff pass on this one!

Essential cannabis accessories

First things first, everyone needs some cannabis supplies before lighting up. But with so many twists on glassware and other options, how do you decide? From vaporizers to grinders to pen batteries, PopSci’s roundup of essential cannabis accessories will walk you through the choices.

A step-by-step guide to rolling a joint

Rolling a joint can’t be that hard, right? Wrong. Thankfully, in honor of 4/20, our DIY step-by-step guide will explain both the art and the science of rolling a joint, with advice straight from some of New York City’s expert budtenders. It’s the perfect refresher for veterans and crash course for newbies, complete with photos, detailed instructions, and material recommendations.

Can CBD help you chill? Here’s what we know so far.

CBD, THC’s sister molecule, has been working its way into various products as part of a budding industry. CBD is legal in more US states than cannabis, and can be added to almost any product as long as it has less than 0.3 percent THC. It’s a great alternative for those looking for stress relief, or don’t want the psychoactive effects of cannabis itself. Still have some questions about CBD? It’s not a panacea, but it may be worth trying out.

Is growing weed sustainable? The answer is complicated.

Using cannabis products to ease climate anxiety might be a Catch-22. Researchers say it’s hard to measure the environmental impact of today’s celebrated plant: Grow operations across the US take up a lot of water, land, and energy. Here’s what we know about the sustainability of cannabis.

Can you overdose on weed?

All substances have their risks, what about weed? Well, thankfully its not possible to overdose in the traditional sense, but overdoing it does pose some safety threats. Before you celebrate 4/20, listen to this Ask Us Anything podcast on the side effects of weed to gain some insights on responsible consumption.

The tasty chemicals flavoring the edible cannabis boom

Cannabis may have a distinctive smell, but a little-known aspect to users and non-users alike is that each strain has a special chemical composition. Like wine with its various aromas (such as floral, fruity, or earthy) different strains of cannabis possess a signature scent and taste. What makes them unique? Terpenes, or “terps,” are aromatic compounds found in many herbs and flowers. There are hundreds of known kinds that yield diverse flavors and effects. PopSci reported a comprehensive overview on the science of terpenes, ending with a list of the most buyable varieties.

Is marijuana a performance-enhancing drug? The best evidence says no.

Unfortunately for many athletes, cannabis use still falls on the list of prohibited substances. These regulations are in place to prevent the use of performance-enhancing drugs and ensure fair competition, but does cannabis really belong on the same list as steroids? Learn why the scientific reasoning behind cannabis regulations in sports might be lacking.

Cannabis gets its high-inducing power from ancient viruses

The next time a friend thanks a higher power for cannabis, remind them to appreciate viruses for their genetic contributions. (At the very least, it was a joint effort.) The psychoactive and medicinal effects of cannabis probably evolved from ancient viruses Mapping the genome of the plant posed a challenge to researchers as an illicit substance, but as it slowly became legal in different states over the past two decades, they dove deep into its background. What better time than 4/20 to learn the evolutionary history of cannabis.

Why German scientists got cows stoned

Nobody wants animals to get high on our supply, but these German scientists did it on purpose with cows. Not to laugh at the animals’ “pronounced tongue play,” as researchers described: They wanted to test if leftover organic matter from the hemp industry could be fed to livestock, reducing waste and curbing methane emissions from regular hay and soy. The German study led to some especially silly bovine behavior and THC-spiked milk.

Does CBD show up on a drug test?

Using cannabis products might lead to a positive drug test that could cost you a job or other opportunities. For those that want the stress-reducing effects of cannabis, but have to keep off the grass, consider quality products with this CBD drug test and product guide.

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In the United States, there are over 6,500 rural and urban areas where residents have limited access to stores that sell affordable, nutritious food. Living in these places, sometimes dubbed “food deserts”, can lead to poor diet and associated health risks. However, unlike deserts, the lack of access to healthy food in communities does not occur naturally. They developed over time as a result of racially discriminatory policies and systematic disinvestment.

Given the increase in food insecurity in urban areas, some cities have begun experiments with edible landscapes to address food insecurity. By working together to grow a “food forest,” community members can increase their access to local food sources.

Food forests, or edible forest gardens, are a type of agroforestry system that “mimic the structure and function of a natural forest ecosystem, but are designed to produce food, medicine, fiber, and other products for human use,” says Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an associate professor at James Madison University whose research focuses on the social-ecological dynamics of urban forests. 

[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]

The first public food forest in the US—the Dr. George Washington Carver Edible Park in North Carolina—opened in 1997. As of 2018, there are more than 70 food forests in public spaces across the country.

Schmitt-Harsh says different layers of vegetation—like trees, shrubs, herbs, and ground covers—all work together to “create a sustainable and diverse food production system.” For example, a food forest could be composed of tall trees like chestnut or walnut as the canopy layer and apple or persimmon trees as the sub-canopy layer. Beneath them can lie currant bushes like elderberry or spicebush, along with edible herbs and mushrooms. Ground cover, medical roots, and climbing plants are also included. “You can swap out any of these selections for your favorite nut trees, fruit crops, and herbs to make your own system,” says Schmitt-Harsh.

Food forests may be grown on private properties, vacant lots, parks, or other open spaces in otherwise urban environments. This helps residents by forming a food production system within the community. The forests, which are typically at least 1/8 of an acre, can be critical in areas where local, fresh foods are inaccessible or unaffordable, says Sheila K. Schueller, ecosystem science and management lecturer at the University of Michigan.

Schueller says food forests don’t just give people access to fresh and nutritious fruits, nuts, and produce, but also empower neighborhoods by increasing food security and sovereignty and the sense of community. Moreover, connecting people with the source of their food may raise awareness about “the benefits of sustainable forms of agriculture and the value of local in-season foods over distantly-sourced or unsustainably-grown foods,” she adds.

Climate change mitigation and adaptation

The ecologically diverse system of food forests benefits the environment in so many ways, says Schueller. For instance, the structural complexity of the different layers can attract perching and nesting birds, while the variety of blooms expands the habitat of pollinators. Deeper root systems also improve water retention. Lastly, the vegetation provides shade and improves temperature regulation, which is ideal in hot cities or arid climates. All of these improve resilience in the face of changing climates and extreme weather events, says Schueller.

[Related: Paleo and keto diets aren’t great for you or the planet, study says.]

Food forests also help mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.

Since they have trees, shrubs, and perennial plants, Schueller says food forests can store more carbon in their biomass and the soil compared to other food systems or land use such as annually tilled crops or lawns.

“This increased vertical layering of plants means that more carbon is sequestered per area, and especially the woody vegetation stores more carbon long term,” she adds. “Food forests are not annually tilled like most crops and have deep root systems, so they can store a lot of carbon in the soil and below-ground vegetation.”

Having an abundance of locally-sourced foods in the community minimizes greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well, particularly those caused by transportation across the food chain. A 2021 Nature Food study previously estimated that food transportation contributed around 4.8 percent of the GHG emissions of the global food system, but newer research suggests it accounts for about 19 percent instead. In general, Schmitt-Harsh says food forests can reduce the food miles traveled, or the distance from where the food was grown to where it’s eaten.

The interest and advocacy for food forests have grown alongside other local food movements, like farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs. They are all experiencing an upward trend in urban and suburban landscapes as communities explore ways to bring food production closer to home, says Schmitt-Harsh. 

A 2017 Public Health Nutrition study on low-income adults’ perceptions of farmers’ markets and CSA programs found that residents of urban, affordable housing communities are motivated to eat healthily, but they cannot afford them. Accepting benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would increase their access to healthy foods and reduce health risks.

“Some of the most successful community food forests are those that embrace a grassroots approach and engage multiple stakeholders in promoting community building and food literacy,” says Schmitt-Harsh. 
If you want to grow a food forest in your area, try getting in touch with potential stakeholders like local governments, community-based groups, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations that can mobilize community members to participate in civic activities. Who knows, there might be an organization near you already.

The post Food forests can bring climate resilience, better health, and tasty produce to city residents appeared first on Popular Science.

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One of the perks of living in a semi-rural area is the availability of fresh eggs. At least four people I know have hens roaming their yards, so my wife and I get all the eggs we can use, and then some. They end up in a wooden egg holder that sits right out on the counter.

That’s right, freshly-laid eggs don’t have to be refrigerated and can be kept at room temperature for weeks. Indeed, in many places around the world, eggs typically aren’t refrigerated at all. In the US, though, both the Federal Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend always refrigerating eggs. However, that’s not directly because of the eggs themselves—it’s to prevent bacterial illnesses, specifically salmonella.

Freshly laid eggs have a natural defense against bacteria: a protective protein coating called the cuticle, or “bloom,” says Jacob R. Tuell, assistant professor of animal science and food science at Northwest Missouri State University. The bloom seals up those pores, preventing bacteria from sneaking inside. Research has shown that the cuticle is effective at keeping salmonella at bay for about three to four days after laying, he explains. After that, its effectiveness begins to deteriorate. In the US, commercially produced eggs are washed to eliminate any possible salmonella, but that washing process also removes the protective bloom. This, in turn, speeds up the spoiling process and necessitates refrigeration. Elsewhere, eggs often aren’t washed before being sold, so the bloom remains in place, sealing out any bacteria. In short: if you bought your eggs at a store, are unsure how fresh they are, or don’t know if they’ve been washed, put them in the fridge.

However, flocks raised in US backyards don’t have the same washing requirements, Trager says. “If you keep the coop clean and have good bedding, there’s really no reason to refrigerate or wash the eggs.” As long as the bloom remains intact, eggs can last for weeks at room temperature without spoiling, he explains.

And of course, there’s no reason you can’t store fresh eggs in the refrigerator if that makes you more comfortable, washed or unwashed. Once they go in, though, they have to stay there. However, Trager cautions against storing washed eggs on a wooden tray. Wood is too porous to be properly sterilized and may transfer contaminants through the pores of the bloom-less eggs, he explains. So if you’re planning to make this wooden egg tray, only use it for fresh, unwashed eggs.

Warning: DIY projects can be dangerous, even for the most experienced makers. Before proceeding with this or any other project on our site, ensure you have all necessary safety gear and know how to use it properly. At minimum, that may include safety glasses, a face mask, and/or ear protection. If you’re using power tools, you must know how to use them safely and correctly. If you do not, or are otherwise uncomfortable with anything described here, don’t attempt this project.

How to build a wooden egg holder

Stats

• Time: 1 to 2 hours
• Material cost: $5 to $20
• Difficulty: easy

Materials

• A 2-foot-long, 1-by-4-inch board (any kind of wood you like)
• Wood glue
• (Optional) ¼-inch dowel

Tools

• Miter saw
• Table saw
• Jointer
• Planer
• Speed square
• Tape measure
• Orbital sander
• Sanding discs (120-, 150-, and 220-grit)
• Drill press (or drill)
• Clamps
• ⅛-inch drill bit
• 1 ¼-inch Forstner bit
• (Optional) router
• (Optional) chamfer router bit
• (Optional) ¼-inch drill bit
• (Optional) chisel

Instructions

1. Mill your lumber to size. This is one of those projects where having flat, square boards will make your life easier. We have a comprehensive guide to milling lumber, but it’s a straightforward process. Start by cutting the pieces of the egg holder to rough length on your miter saw: one board of 13 inches and two of about 5 inches each. Then run them over your jointer to flatten one face, and again to flatten and square one edge. 

Next, take them to your planer to flatten the remaining face, and trim them down to final width and length on your table saw. When you’re done, you should have three boards, all between ½ and ¾ inches thick: 

• 1 (12½-by-4-inch) board
• 2 (5–by-4-inch) boards

If you purchased pre-milled, square wood, you may be able to skip this step. But double-check that everything actually is flat and square.

2. Measure and mark the egg hole locations on the longest board. Before measuring the centers of the 12 holes on this board, use a square to draw a line across what will be the top of your egg holder, parallel to the end of the board and a quarter-inch in. This represents the depth of the dado where this piece of wood will sit inside the two shorter boards—we’ll worry about cutting that slot in Step 6. The distance between those two lines should be exactly 12 inches.  

Using your square and a tape measure or ruler, draw lines 1 inch, 3 inches, and 5 inches from those dado lines, moving toward the center of the board. Then make two marks on each of these new lines, 1 inch in from the long edges of the board. Those 12 intersections are where the centers of the egg holes belong.

3. Drill pilot holes in the board. Anytime you use a Forstner bit to drill all the way through a board, start with some pilot holes. Forstner bits are known to blow out or chip wood as they exit, so the best practice is to drill halfway through from the top, then turn the board over and drill the rest from the bottom to prevent tear-out. The easiest way to line those two cuts up is with a pilot hole.

If you have a drill press, drill the 12 small holes with that, using a ⅛-inch bit, or whatever size in that range you have. If you use a hand drill, make sure it’s straight up and down. You can use a speed square as a visual reference, or you can make a quick drill guide to keep the hole perpendicular to the face. If the drill bit wanders or leans, the two Forstner holes may not line up properly, and you’ll have to do a lot of sanding to fix it. No one wants to do any more sanding than they need to.

4. Drill the full holes. Change the ⅛-inch bit out for the 1 ¼-inch Forstner bit. Again, a drill press is best for this cut, but a handheld drill can do the job if you’re careful and use a jig for alignment. Center the bit in a pilot hole, and start to drill. Stop when you get just past halfway. Drill all the holes halfway through on one face of the board, then flip it over and drill from the other side.

5. (Optional) Chamfer the edges of the holes. To help the eggs sit better and reduce the chances that they’ll crack on sharp edges, chamfer the top edges of each hole. The easiest way to do this is with a router and a chamfering bit. I used a router table to make this cut, but if you don’t have access to one, you can use a palm router. Make sure to clamp your board securely to the work bench if you do. 

• Note: If you don’t chamfer the hole edges, at least thoroughly round them over with sandpaper.

6. Cut dado slots into the legs. There are many ways to cut dado slots. My preferred method, and the one accessible to most people, is on the table saw with a crosscut sled. If you have a flat-cut table saw blade, like one that comes with a dado stack, use that, but it’s fine if you just have a normal blade. You can use a full dado stack to make this cut faster, but I wasn’t comfortable using mine on such a small board so I made multiple passes with a single blade.

[Related: How to refinish a scratched wooden cutting board]

Mark a line ¾ of an inch from the bottom of the leg, then make another line above it so the distance between the two is the thickness of the tray board. Set the height of your blade to a quarter-inch, and start removing the material between those lines by making one cut on your crosscut sled. Keep moving the leg over about ⅛-inch to make additional cuts. Repeat this as many times as you need to in order for the tray to fit in the slot. 

If you use a standard blade for this, you’ll probably wind up with little wedges on the bottom of the slot. Trim those flat with a chisel.

7. (Optional) Cut curves on the corners of the legs. This is purely for aesthetics, but I love the way it looks. Draw a small arc at each corner of every leg board. You can use any cylindrical object to trace these—I used a spray paint bottle cap. Then remove the wood outside of that arc. I cut mine first with a band saw, then rounded it over with a sander, but a jig saw or coping saw will work as well. You can even just jump right to the sander, though that will take a bit longer.

8. (Optional) Add dowels for stacking. If you’re planning to make more than one tray, you may want to consider stacking them. Of course, you can place one on top of the other, but there’s always the risk that it will slide off and splatter your eggs. To give it some support, drill a ¼-inch hole in the top and bottom centers of the legs. Insert a dowel in the top of the bottom tray legs, and then you can slide the top tray onto that dowel, locking it into place. Round over the ends of the dowels with 120-grit sandpaper to make them easier to slide in and out. 

9. Sand everything to 220-grit. You’ve heard me say it before—sanding is the difference between a good product and a great product. Sand all of the pieces with an orbital sander, working through the grits—start with 120 and finish with 220. The hard part of this build is sanding the holes and chamfers, if you made them. You can use your fingers to get inside everything, or you can use a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a dowel. Of course, if you have a spindle sander, use that and save your fingers.

• Pro tip: If you use a dowel, you can open the chuck of your power drill all the way, stick the dowel in, and tighten it up. Then you can wrap the dowel in sandpaper and use the drill to spin it quickly inside the holes.

Before you finish sanding, slightly round over all sharp edges with 220-grit sandpaper to keep them from splintering or breaking later. 

The post Go ahead, leave your fresh eggs on the counter in this handmade wooden tray appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best vegan taco meat		Gardein Gluten-Free Ultimate Plant-Based Beefless Ground Crumbles		SEE IT	This vegan and kosher ground meat substitute has all of the flavor and texture, with none of the meat.
Best McNuggets stand-in		SIMULATE chicken NUGGS		SEE IT	These chicken nugget alternatives have even more protein than their meat-based rival.
Best vegetarian meat		MorningStar Farms Veggie Breakfast Meatless Bacon Strips		SEE IT	Your BLT and morning breakfast spread can have all the flavor, with none of the meat.

Whether you’re working hard to stick with your first Veganuary or decades into a conscious, conscientious lifestyle journey, varying up the menu is equally important. Eating a diet higher in fruits, vegetables, and other meat alternatives is healthier for your body and can also be healthier for the planet. However, adapting your diet and exciting the palate can be challenging if you just dump some tofu or tempeh out of the package and into an otherwise familiar dish thinking it will be anything but bland. So, whether you are trying out Meatless Mondays, replacing several meals a week, or prepping to make a total shift to vegetarianism or veganism, plant-based “meats” will help ease the transition. You can often follow the same recipes you enjoy; just swap out the beef, pork, or chicken for better-than-you-would-think fake meats and/or better-for-you protein sources. Our picks for the best meat alternatives will help you navigate and appreciate the options, allowing you to replicate comfort foods quickly and easily.

• Best McNuggets stand-in: SIMULATE chicken NUGGS
• Best “chicken” sandwich: VFC Chick*n Fillets
• Best vegan taco meat: Gardein Beefless Ground Crumbles
• Best for stir-frying and salads: Hodo Tofu
• Best “steak” and “cutlets”: Meati
• Best meatless meat burger: Beyond Burger
• Best for wraps and grain bowls: Afia Falafel
• Best vegetarian meat: MorningStar Farms Veggie Bacon Strips
• Best vegan meat substitutes: Upton’s Naturals Jackfruit  
• Best plant-based sauce/dressing/marinade: Haven’s Kitchen

How we chose the best meat alternatives

To get to the meat of this matter, we relied primarily on personal experience. There are multiple vegetarians on the PopSci staff, but also grillmasters, so we gathered opinions from those who both do and do not eat meat regularly to learn what they considered most satisfying as a 1:1 swap and what stood out as its own thing. After polling peers, we looked at real-world impressions and considered critical takes to narrow our list of the most satisfying, least challenging meat alternatives.

The best meat alternatives: Reviews & Recommendations

Meat alternatives use advances in nutritional science to offer great taste and texture that takes familiar forms. While different brands use various ingredients, common ways to make fake meat are wheat protein, soy protein, wheat gluten, pea proteins, grains, potato starch, and beans reformed to resemble and taste “similar” to meat. You can buy a bag of texturized vegetable protein chunks, which are meant to be used in recipes in place of diced chicken breast. Very popular fake meat items include chicken tenders, chicken nuggets, chicken patties, as well as vegan taco meats, burgers, and breakfast patties/links. These alternatives are delicious and ensure you don’t miss the meat when made well.

When you go meatless, however, you will run across two types of non-meat proteins: vegan or vegetarian. Vegans omit all animal products, including eggs and dairy (as well as enzymes and additives from animal sources, think gelatin or insect-derived dyes, for example). Vegetarians, on the other hand, typically only omit the meat (though, based on personal preference, they may adopt stricter but not quite vegan rules). Keep this in mind when looking at non-meat proteins because vegetarian meats may still contain ingredients unsuited for vegans. Whether you are trying to improve your cholesterol and general well-being by eating a plant-based diet or trying to help reduce the reliance on factory farms and that industry’s stress on the planet, there are plenty of reasons to skip meat these days. Here is a list of the best meat alternatives for you to chew on:  

Best McNuggets stand-in: SIMULATE chicken NUGGS

SEE IT

Americans like chicken. Lots of chicken. A favorite of children and adults alike, breaded chicken nuggets, tenders, and patties are a satisfying food for even the most finicky eater. Luckily, the pleasingly chewy texture of that ground-up, blended, seasoned, and breaded chunk of comfort is not hard to replicate with meat alternatives. You’ll find a huge variety of brands to choose from, with both vegan and vegetarian options. These have become so popular because they are tasty and a way to feel better about your eating. 

The SIMULATE company has created a vegan chicken nugget and vegan chicken patty using wheat and soy proteins. Like a software company, SIMULATE listens to feedback and tweaks its product to perfect the yummy, chewy chicken goodness. Available in regular, spicy (our favorite), or dino (a close second favorite)—and particularly great when made in one of the best air fryers—NUGGS let you experience the joy of a McDonald’s 10-piece with a modicum less guilt.

Best “chicken” sandwich: VFC Chick*n Fillets

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If you’re a Year One vegetarian, you’ll come upon The Craving eventually. Whether it’s for BBQ or a burger or bacon, most former meat-eaters pass through this gauntlet of temptation, this inability to recapture a specific umami that threatens your resolve. For some, including this guy, it was a chicken sandwich that almost fueled the backslide. While delicious, no amount of southern-fried mushrooms truly hit the spot, and the freezer-aisle selections continuously fell short. I’ve been a vegetarian for years, but would still reminisce sometimes about the sensation of those fast-food fillets … until I tried VFC (Vegan Fried Chicken), a British brand that managed to capture more of the crisp-and-juicy, properly seasoned nature of sandwiches from below the Mason-Dixon (looking at you, Chick-fil-A). Maybe it comes as little surprise that the company’s co-founder, Matthew Glover, also co-founded the Veganuary movement.

Wheat, soy, and pea proteins wrapped in a light cornflake coating with a pop of garlic, mustard seed, and black pepper, the VFC Chick*n Fillets are “meaty” without being offputting. A lot of striated plant-based meats are chewy in an unpleasant way, but not VFC. (Of course, part of the secret is dialing down the air fryer temperature by 25 degrees and always sticking to the bottom of the time range, or even a minute under.) Looking to eat less bread? You can also get VFC Chick*n Tenders (the sauce-friendly bar-menu classic), Chick*n Bites (chonkier nuggets), or Popcorn Chick*n (particularly good to throw on greens). All three provided a similar sense of satisfaction, replacing the last lingerings of The Craving with a new desire.

Best vegan taco meat: Gardein Beefless Ground Crumbles

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Taco night is a crowd-pleaser. Ground beef sauteed and loaded into warm tortillas with heaps of flavorful toppings … we’re getting hungry just writing this. So much of what goes into creating a great taco is the combination of spices and hot-cold soft-crunchy sensations that one could argue that the meat is not the star, but it’s undoubtedly important to create the overall balance.

The best vegan taco meat replicates the flavor and texture of beef, and because you will be simmering it in your favorite spices or sauce, it is an easy substitution. Like other plant-based meat alternatives, most vegan taco meat is made using a blend of ingredients with texturized soy protein. Unlike beef, however, many of these beefless crumbles are already seasoned and salted, so you may need to adjust your recipe to accommodate for this.

While the texture won’t allow you to ball up and turn this into meatballs or meatloaf like some ground beef alternatives, these crumbles can also easily be added to your Sloppy Joe, lasagna, or bolognese sauces. 

A seasoned bag of frozen crumbles ready to add to all your favorite ground beef recipes, this plant-based protein offers 18 grams per serving, with no dairy or gluten. Tailor your seasoning and salt, however, as these are already seasoned.

Best for stir-fry and salads: Hodo Tofu

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Don’t get us wrong, when it comes to “meat” alternatives, plenty of thrillers come from fillers. You can get a great-tasting slab from a lab. But one of the best plant-based proteins remains arguably the first: toothsome ole tofu. Water, soybeans, natural coagulant. You can cook with it fresh or frozen; the texture can be jiggly as jello or chewy as shredded chicken—minus the gelatin or muscle tissue, of course. Zero collagens, etc. Toss some cold onto greens for something silken and satiating or dump it into an air fryer if you prefer warm, plump, pillowy. And it takes to every manner of flavor just as readily as skinless breast meat—the blank canvas of cooking.

Launched from a San Francisco Bay Area farmers market over 20 years ago, Hodo pre-marinated cubes and crumbles can be found at Whole Foods, Target, etc., as well as in dishes from Chipotle and more. Gluten-free, egg-free, tree nut-free, Kosher … these good beans pack in protein, calcium, and fiber. Infused with spice blends such as Thai curry, Harissa, Moroccan Chermoula, Chinese 5 Spice, and more, these ready-to-eat nuggets let you skip the pressing and other prep and get right to putting the finishing touches on your stir-fry or salad.

Fantasizing about another flavor profile? The hodo Mexican Crumbles (shown above) form the foundation of your customized version of Chipotle’s sofritas bowl. Or grab some hodo traditional extra-firm tofu and a bowl, then keep reading because we’ve got a recommendation for condiments that will swiftly add savoriness.

Best “steak” and “cutlets”: Meati

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Whereas many plant-based “meats” occupy themselves primarily with replicating taste, Eat Meati’s products aim for the texture territory. Harvesting whole mushroom root, then pressing it to remove the water, Meati achieves a fibrous, nutrient-rich protein that can sit in for steak or chicken breast to grill, sauté, or air fry—just season as desired and add mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, an iceberg lettuce wedge in bleu cheese dressing, or whatever other classic sides or salads you crave. Maybe assemble a hot “chicken” sandwich with the crispy cutlet, a bahn meati with savory slices of fish sauce/soy sauce/rice vinegar/garlic-marinated “steak,” or carne asada tacos. I grilled a simple salt-and-pepper steak and found it offered a familiar but also distinctive umami—it might actually be too, well, meaty for some hardcore vegans. A crispy cutlet on quinoa and roast broccoli (shown above) wasn’t as striated as the steak but also wasn’t the uniformly ground filling of a chicken patty, etc. They’re juicy and toothsome enough to have been adopted in the upgraded Chik’N sandwich for the PLNT Burger chain. With a clear ingredients list compared to many highly processed meat alternatives, Meati can satisfy vegetarians wanting clean eating but also offers a great transition for flexitarians.

Best meatless meat burger: Beyond Burger

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One of the things standing in the way of people (especially burger lovers) cutting down on meat has been the lack of a satisfying alternative to ground beef-based foods. Veggie burgers had a bad rep for a long time for being dry or crumbly and never quite the right texture to feel like more than a chunky disc. But advances have been made, so much so that major restaurants and even fast-food chains have adopted the Impossible and Beyond Meat brands—which recreate the feel and taste of actual beef burgers. With an eye for the details down to the “blood” and an iron-rich flavor, they offer the best way yet for fans to make the transition to fake meat without feeling like they are missing out on the joy of a juicy burger.

These burgers from Beyond Meat—a brand that also makes a killer spicy sausage patty, add biscuit for the perfect Southern breakfast—are so “real” it’s like magic, but it’s just science. This is a real burger experience, so you can feel good about eating a plant-based diet that is better for the Earth. Just don’t overdo it, as the sodium content is high.

Best for wraps and grain bowls: Afia Falafel

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Oh chickpeas, did it hurt when you falafel from heaven? When it comes to legumes, the mighty chickpea might be, no is the best. And there’s no better way to enjoy this high-protein, high-fiber “pea” than as part of a meal that’s well-rounded in more than one way. Deep-fried balls of chickpea flour, particularly delicious with tahini (such as the Haven’s Kitchen sauce a couple of entries below), falafel is a perfect street food that can be just as poppin’ from your kitchen. (Plus, it’s gluten-free.)

Afia Falafel offers you access to these small tasty things from the convenience of your freezer. Good from the oven, toaster, or air fryer—crisp on the outside, fluffy and moist on the inside—this versatile blend of garbanzo beans, onion, parsley, cumin, coriander, and other Mediterranean spices can fill a perfect pita or top a compelling grain bowl. Add hummus (more chickpeas!) and harissa for a harmonious medley. You don’t have to search externally for more flavor, however, as Afia offers varieties including garlic & herb, turmeric, za’atar, and sun-dried tomato.

Best vegetarian meat: MorningStar Farms Veggie Bacon Strips

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What’s a big American-style breakfast without some bacon or sausages? These rich, fatty, salty indulgences are hardly healthy, but sure do taste good with eggs, pancakes, or just by themselves. Non-meat protein options offer a great-tasting solution, as manufacturers have mastered the seasoning so well that you’ll hardly notice or miss the real thing. 

Unlike vegan meats, vegetarian meat will include some animal products. For example, vegetarian bacon uses egg whites for texture and protein. Other vegetarian meats might also use milk. With some animal products, vegetarian meats won’t always be cholesterol-free, but they will have a lot less than real bacon and real sausages. A reduced fat and cholesterol content is a health advantage, but these products are often highly processed and can contain a lot of sodium. Eating these non-meat proteins sparingly is important, however, as they are healthier but far from health food. 

Packed with flavor, this faux bacon uses egg whites, wheat gluten, and vegetable protein to provide a tasty alternative for your vegetarian breakfast, breakfast for dinner, brunch, midnight snack, even afternoon tea, and elevenses … you get it. This brand is very popular and widely available—and the flavor is so good you’ll want to pig out, minus the pig—but note they use food coloring and artificial flavors.

Best vegan meat substitutes: Upton’s Naturals Jackfruit  

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Here’s a fruitful idea for vegan meat substitutes. One additional step beyond “meatless meat” is jackfruit, long popular in Southeast Asia and gaining popularity as more people switch to plant-based diets. It is now possible to buy fresh jackfruit in many domestic supermarkets, and a wide variety of preseasoned jackfruit foods and canned jackfruit are also available for purchase. Jackfruit can be made into burgers or thrown into recipes where you’d add chicken strips, though it is best known as one of the vegan meat substitutes with a texture perfect for a well-sauced pulled pork sandwich. Filled with nutrition, jackfruit is a great source of fiber, plus it offers magnesium, vitamin B6, and antioxidants. Unlike many vegan types of meat, jackfruit products are minimally processed, and the fruit can be eaten raw or cooked. However, because jackfruit is, well, a fruit, it is low in protein, so nutrition experts suggest mixing jackfruit with beans or nuts to create a balanced meal. 

One of the quick and easy vegan meat substitutes, just heat and serve. Jackfruit is cooked and seasoned to replace the meat in your favorite pulled pork recipes, and it’s also great in a wrap or salad. There are also chili-lime carnitas and Thai curry varieties. Just remember to add other plant proteins for a complete meal.

Best plant-based sauce/dressing/marinade: Haven’s Kitchen

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A great sauce is the instant upgrade meat alternatives need—particularly tofu, if it’s not already zestily marinated like hodo’s options above. However, ample seasoning is also wonderful for protein-rich, rounded-nutrition greens and/or grains. But sauces, dressings, and what have you can actually take up the majority of your prep time with all the chopping, blending, reducing, adding pinches of this and punching things up, etc.

Founded in New York City in 2012, Haven’s Kitchen makes ready-to-eat palate-pleasers packaged in 100% recyclable squeeze pouches for a lighter impact on the Earth. Herby chimichurri, red pepper romesco, gingery miso—these are just some of the many vegan, vibrant concoctions that add tangy versatility to your meals. If you’re looking for a bright boost with minimal fuss, any of the Haven’s Kitchen pre-packaged international odes are an effortless elevator. Able to save you time without unidentifiable additives, these fresh dressings will quickly become a pantry—well, refrigerator—staple.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best meat alternatives

• Best McNuggets stand-in: SIMULATE chicken NUGGS
• Best “chicken” sandwich: VFC Chick*n Fillets
• Best vegan taco meat: Gardein Beefless Ground Crumbles
• Best for stir-frying and salads: Hodo Tofu
• Best “steak” and “cutlets”: Meati
• Best meatless meat burger: Beyond Burger
• Best for wraps and grain bowls: Afia Falafel
• Best vegetarian meat: MorningStar Farms Veggie Bacon Strips
• Best vegan meat substitutes: Upton’s Naturals Jackfruit  
• Best plant-based sauce/dressing/marinade: Haven’s Kitchen

The best meat alternatives will taste great and be easy to add to all your favorite recipes. Meatless meats can be vegan or vegetarian and use various ingredients to offer a protein-packed alternative to meat. Created to imitate the flavor, look, and texture of your favorite meats, the delicious meat alternatives available on the market are increasing daily.

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Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

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In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between.

THE FIRST TIME I had cilantro, I sat in the car with my mother, eating tacos from her favorite spot. As I settled in and took my first bite, I was immediately disgusted and spit it out. After repeated insistence that her food tasted fine and a quick Google search, we deduced that the problem was the cilantro and that I was, sadly, someone to whom it tasted like soap—Dove Sensitive Skin Beauty Bar, to be specific.

“You must get that from yo’ daddy,” she said, laughing. 

The dislike of cilantro is a commonly known food aversion, though it affects only a small section of the population. A 2012 study on young adults in Canada found that, generally, dislike of cilantro ranges between 3 and 21 percent of the population, with varying ethnocultural specificities. Nevertheless, my mama isn’t wrong. There’s a strong chance that I did inherit this distaste for cilantro from my father or someone else in my direct lineage. But before we get into the genetic variations, it’s essential to understand the difference between literal taste and the perception of flavor. 

Taste, scientifically, covers only salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami, which are chemical cues picked up by the tongue, explains James N. Palmer, the director of the division of rhinology at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. “Flavor is the combination of taste and smell,” he says. “So what people will call taste isn’t really taste: It’s flavor.” 

Our food is broken down with our teeth and the enzymes in our saliva when we eat. Next, the chomped-up bits glide over our papillae, the thousands of little bumps on the tongue, the roof of the mouth, and the throat. Those bumps contain taste buds, which each have between 50 to 100 chemical receptors that identify the five tastes. 

“We use our taste system simply to identify specific chemicals in our food,” says Kathryn Medler, a professor in the University of Buffalo’s biological sciences department. “There are things that we need in our diet, so we prefer them. We eat things that are sweet, salty, or umami [because] those are [nutrients] that we need in our diet in order to be healthy. And we innately avoid sour things, which are going to potentially identify spoiled foods, as well as bitter, which are going to identify potential toxins.” (The cool thing about your taste buds, however, is that you can train them to acquire a taste for sour and bitter flavors.) 

The chewing process also releases odorants. These smells travel up the back of the nasopharynx and into the back part of the nose, resulting in retronasal olfaction, which is how we process odors while consuming food. As we chew, our brains combine these signals to determine the flavor of a food or drink. (Our brains also pick up on mouthfeel–like stringiness or crispiness–as we chew, but that is a separate sensory process.) For instance, Palmer says that steak sauce and chocolate have the same levels of bitterness, sour, and sweet, and that it’s our sense of smell that makes us perceive them as different flavors.

Once the distinction between taste and flavor is clear, it’s easier to understand how DNA affects how we enjoy—or don’t enjoy—certain foods. Our genes influence how we experience flavor, not taste itself. Cilantro will always have a fresh, citrusy smell. But due to a variation in a cluster of olfactory receptor genes that makes them more sensitive to the scents of aldehyde chemicals—found in cilantro and used in soap making—eating cilantro can feel like chewing on a sudsy washrag to some people because the scent of aldehyde is released during chewing.

There are other factors—such as the foods we grew up eating—at play when it comes to why we love or hate certain tastes and flavors. 

Most taste preferences and differences are not necessarily related to genes, says Medler; some can also be related to the cultures or regions we were raised or live in. Take okra, for instance. Medler and I both grew up eating fried okra because we’re Southerners, and we remain very fond of it because it reminds us of home. However, her husband, who grew up in New England, could take it or leave it. “It’s not that he inherently tasted something different than I tasted, but he doesn’t have the positive associations with it,” she explains. 

But both Medler and I lose our affection for okra when it’s cooked in a way that makes it become slimy. The vegetable’s texture is crispier when it’s fried, because frying eliminates most of the gumminess. When it’s included in gumbo or the Nigerian soup obe ila, though, the slippery nature is more pronounced. Enjoying that mouthfeel is typically learned: A friend who grew up eating obe ila loves okra as a stew or fried—in part because it has positive associations for him and because he’s familiar with its textures.

Still, some food experiences, like my soapy-taco debacle, are genetically set in stone. “Everybody’s genetics are slightly different, which means their taste receptors are slightly different, which means [everyone is] going to have different powers in terms of tasting things,” says Palmer. 

“I smile when my patients say, ‘Well, why do things taste different to me than they do to somebody else?’” he continues. “You’re a different height than everybody else. … You have all sorts of other genetic characteristics that differ. So you would expect taste genetics and smell genetics, and therefore flavor genetics, to be different for every person.”

Read more PopSci+ stories. 

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In the United States, almost 32 percent of the average household’s purchased food goes to waste, a total annual loss of around $240 billion. All that squandered sustenance is hard on a household budget, as the moment spoiled food hits the trash can or compost heap, your money goes with it. But if you want to, you know, get what you paid for and eat your groceries instead, consider dehydrating them before they go bad.

How to make dehydrated food

Safely dehydrating food is fairly straightforward, according to Bryan Mayer, a butchery educator based in Kailua, Hawaii. He points out that safe dehydration techniques predate the Industrial Revolution by centuries.

“This has been a part of how we’ve made food safe to eat pre-refrigeration and certainly pre-canning, so it’s something that’s totally within reach for most people,” he explains. “It’s certainly something fun to do and something that I think we can use on an individual basis to reduce waste, keep things out of compost.”

Dehydrating meat, poultry, and fish

Mayer says the main thing to know about drying raw meat, poultry, and fish is that you’ll need to first cook it to a food-safe temperature specific to that protein before reducing the heat to a level more appropriate for dehydrating. If you need a reference, the US Department of Agriculture has a list of safe minimum internal temperatures for various foods.

Beyond that, start with the best-quality cut you can get, Mayer says. He recommends leaner cuts because you’ll have less overall work to do, since you’ll want to remove the fat if there is any.

“You’ll want to slice it however thick or thin you want, and then you’ll want to marinate it, usually up to 24 hours,” he says. The longer you marinate, the more any salt within your spice mix will seep into the meat, which means more time for the salt to penetrate cells and break things down.

[Related: Your food could be better if you salt it at the right time]

Any other spices will just sit on the surface of the meat, not making molecular changes like salt will, Mayer adds. There are no rules for what spices or other flavorings you can add to your meat jerky; you can go for tried-and-true options like barbecue sauce or mustard, or add something less likely to be in store-bought varieties, like Dr. Pepper or red wine and fish sauce. The People’s Choice Beef Jerky, a jerky purveyor, has a long list of possible meat jerky flavor combos.

Once you’ve decided the meat has marinated for long enough, line up the strips on a dehydrator rack or on a pan rack in your oven. Experiment with different lengths of time and temperatures, adding more time for lower temperatures (but always make sure as much moisture has been sucked from the meat as possible before you stop).

Dehydrating fruits, vegetables, herbs, and mushrooms

If you’re dehydrating fruits, vegetables, herbs, or mushrooms, it’s important to wash or brush them to remove any dirt, dust, or other contaminants, and prevent new ones, like insects, from getting into your newly dehydrated goods. That will help prevent the food from spoiling.

You’ll then want to cut everything into same-size pieces to ensure dehydration occurs evenly across your rack; a mandoline will help keep your cuts consistent.

Colorado State University recommends choosing one of several fruit pretreatment methods, using pure ascorbic acid crystals, citric acid, or other similar substances to help break down tough skins, prevent discoloration and kill off unhealthy bacteria. 

Because home-dried produce may not dehydrate evenly, you should mitigate mold growth by “conditioning”—loosely packing it in a shakeable container every day for a week—to help distribute any remaining moisture, according to the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia.

For vegetables, cut off any inedible parts, like stems or rot, before washing and thoroughly drying. Different vegetables dehydrate more easily after blanching, or briefly boiling then dunking in an ice bath, according to the Food Network. 

Herbs get a similar treatment: trim off any bruised, discolored, or inedible bits, as well as thicker stems, before you arrange them on the dehydrating rack. But you’ll have less room for temperature and time experimentation with the herbs, so set your dehydrator or countertop oven to the lowest possible setting and let them bake until they’re crumbly. You can also microwave smaller amounts sandwiched between paper towels for two or three minutes, then 30-second intervals until they’re dry.

[Related: Grow long and healthy hair with this DIY rosemary water]

If you don’t want to mechanically dry your herbs, sage, thyme, rosemary and other sturdy herbs can be bundled and air-dried indoors, according to the Oregon State University Master Food Preserver Program. Tender herbs, like basil and mint, can also be bundled and air dried, but OSU recommends hanging them inside a paper bag with vent holes cut in the top and side, closing the top, and placing it somewhere warm with good air circulation.

Dehydrating mushrooms is similar to other types of food dehydration, except you won’t need to think about pretreatment. You’ll want to clean them thoroughly, ensure no bugs are present, and trim off any inedible or tough bits before cutting them into even-size pieces. Different mushrooms will have different dehydrating times based on how moist they are, so a dryer mushroom won’t need as much time in the heat. Like fruits and vegetables, you’ll want to condition your mushrooms by storing them loosely in a sealed container and shaking them daily for a week.

How much food can I dehydrate at once?

At the height of mushroom season, Rob Rubba, a plant-based chef and co-owner of Oyster Oyster in Washington, D.C., says his restaurant “easily” receives deliveries of 100 pounds of local mushrooms each week. Not all of that will look pretty enough to be plated, so the less-attractive items end up dehydrated for use in future recipes.

That’s to say, there’s no maximum amount to how much food you can dehydrate—as long as you have enough space, heat, and time. But best practice is to lay everything out in an even layer with nothing overlapping on a rack on a sheet pan to maximize heat and air flow. Reasonably speaking, you can dehydrate as much as you can fit in your oven or on your dehydrator racks. You can also dehydrate different types of foods at once, but Rubba recommends considering flavor pairings in case of contamination. Apples and garlic, for example, wouldn’t taste great together.

That being said, while a dehydrator will cost money and take up space, having one means you can multitask in the kitchen by dehydrating while you use the oven for other tasks. A food dehydrator is also purpose-built, so you’ll be able to fine-tune your temperature settings, keep the heat and dryness consistent, and use levels of racks to dehydrate more than you could inside a single-rack countertop oven. In a pinch, you may also be able to build your own dehydrator.

But if you’re really low on space for a new kitchen appliance and feel like using a full oven would be a waste, Rubba suggests using the waning heat from cooking or baking in the oven to dehydrate food.

“As the oven cools, there’ll be a declining temperature that will be slowly drying it out,” he explains, adding that this is also a great way to make breadcrumbs. “The next day, you could pull [the food] out and have something dehydrated—and that’s a good way of just utilizing leftover energy.”

Dehydrated mushrooms can become vegan jerky, but they can also be remoistened and used in stocks, stews, or anywhere you would use a regular mushroom. Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health recommends rehydrating mushrooms for 15 to 20 minutes in boiling water.

[Related: 4 benefits of eating mushrooms]

Other dried produce can be rehydrated too. Generally, you’ll need to soak 1 cup of dried food in 1 to 3 cups of water for 30 to 90 minutes, and the University of Georgia has a handy chart you can refer to when rehydrating fruits and vegetables (page 7 of the linked PDF).

Slices or pieces of dried pineapple, oranges, kiwis, or other fruits can be used to garnish drinks and meals, or be eaten as a snack. Veggies can be dried into chips that can be eaten as-is or crushed into other things, like pasta dough and salads, or as a topping. Herbs can be dehydrated and ground into homemade spice mixes.

For bread service at Oyster Oyster, Rubba’s team makes a vegan marigold butter with “an abundance of marigold flowers that we dehydrate to garnish that and give it these pops of lemony, fragrant flavor on the butter,” he explains.

Another benefit of dehydrating foods is the flavor concentration that occurs when the water is stripped out, which Rubba, a 2023 James Beard award finalist, says can lead to “amazing” complexity.

“We’ve boiled and smoked whole pumpkins and then dehydrated those for a week to get this solid, giant piece that we can grate onto dishes, kind of reminiscent of a bonito [flake],” he explains. Rubba’s restaurant has also “reduced cucumber juice slowly in the dehydrator, and it takes on these wild, spicy flavors that you wouldn’t expect from a cucumber.”

How long you can keep dehydrated food

Proper storage is key to making dehydrated foods last. Rubba recommends using an airtight container to loosely pack anything you dehydrate and popping a silica packet inside to wick away any remaining moisture. Just make sure the packet isn’t broken and that you clean or thoroughly check the food when you use it again—silica beads are generally nontoxic but can be a choking hazard.

That’s going to give anything dehydrated a longer life, especially if you live in a humid climate, he explains, adding that dried fruits, veg, and ‘shrooms are shelf-stable but shouldn’t be exposed to moisture, so they’re better stored in the pantry than in the fridge.

Dried herbs, fruits, and vegetables should last up to a year but will not keep as long under hotter conditions; the National Center for Home Food Preservation says most dried fruits can be stored for one year at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, six months at 80 degrees, and that vegetables will last about half as long as fruits.

Properly dried meat won’t last nearly as long, according to the center—only about two weeks in a sealed container at room temperature, although you can refrigerate or freeze it to increase its shelf life. But odds are you’ll eat it long before two weeks pass.

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Food allergies were scarcely reported during the first half of the 20th century. Nowadays, sensitivity to foods like nuts and eggs affect an estimated eight percent of children in the United States. That’s one in 13 children or two students per classroom, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

More than one in 10 children are diagnosed every year across some high income countries, and earlier research has suggested a possible link between animal exposure during pregnancy and early childhood may reduce food allergies. 

Now, an analysis over more than 65,000 infants in Japan found that children exposed to pet cats or indoor dogs during fetal development or early infancy tended to have fewer food allergies compared to other children. The findings were modest (13 to 16 percent less likely to developing food allergies), but had statistical significance and were published March 29 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related from PopSci+: Children are grimy, and that’s (mostly) ok.]

The study did not determine if the link between pet exposure and food allergies is causative, since another factor associated with pet ownership could be causing the association.

Hisao Okabe from the Fukushima Regional Center for the Japan Environment and Children’s Study, Japan and team used data from a nationwide prospective birth cohort study called the Japan Environment and Children’s Study. They used the available data on 66,215 children who had exposure to various pets and food allergies.

During the fetal period, about 22 percent were exposed to pets, most commonly indoor dogs and cats. Among the children exposed to these family pets, the chance of developing a food allergy was lowered by about 14 percent. However, the team did not find a significant difference for children in households with outdoor dogs—the results were more robust with indoor dogs. 

The children exposed to indoor dogs were less likely to develop egg, milk, and nut allergies. Children exposed to cats were less likely to have egg, wheat, and soybean allergies. 

Somewhat surprisingly, the children exposed to hamsters (0.9 percent of the total group studied) showed a 93 percent greater incidence of nut allergies. Since the group that had hamsters was so small, it could be a statistical fluke, but it still jumped out at the team.

Some of the limitations of this study include self reported data (usually from medical records obtained at doctor’s visits), which relies on accurate recall from participants. 

The authors suggest that their results could help guide more research into what is causing childhood food allergies and the hygiene hypothesis. Dating back to 1989, with even deeper theoretical roots in the nineteenth century, this hypothesis proposes that exposure to germs and some infections during childhood helps the immune system develop. The exposure teaches the body to tell the difference between harmless substances from the ones that might trigger a reaction like asthma. In theory, exposure to certain germs teaches the immune system not to overreact, according to the Mayo Clinic. 

[Related: This pseudoscience movement wants to wipe germs from existence.]

“Whatever it is that’s happening in the modern world, it’s causing the immune system to be active when it doesn’t need to be,” microbiologist Graham Rook of University College London told PopSci in an interview last year.

Rook noted that the hygiene hypothesis has its flaws—some viral infections, such as RSV, can trigger asthma, not prevent it. Additionally, a large body of research now blames changes in the human microbiome, not a dearth of childhood infection, for at least some of the sharp rise in chronic diseases. 

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Update 3/31/23: Another food-tech company, Paleo, alleges that they first developed patent pending meat with mammoth myoglobin in 2021, and are now considering legal action against Vow. This post has been updated with their comments, along with a response from Vow

Researchers and ethicists have argued over the how’s, if’s, and should’s of reviving woolly mammoths for years—in the meantime, one startup just reportedly went ahead and cooked up their own version. As first highlighted by The Guardian, an Australian company called Vow has unveiled what it claims to be the first hybrid mammoth meatball made from fragments of the species’ DNA sequence spliced together alongside elephant cells. In doing so, the startup hopes to promote a speedier cultural transition to what could be environmentally friendly, sustainable lab-grown meats while highlighting humans’ impact on species die-off. But another startup is claiming to have developed mammoth myoglobin tech first, and are now considering legal action against Vow.

Industrial animal farming and consumption are widely considered to be some of the largest contributors to greenhouse emissions and water usage. Climate experts have repeatedly urged the importance of transitioning away from this carnivorous mindset towards healthier, sustainable options, but it can often feel like a steep ask for populations so used to their preferred, culturally reinforced diets. While lab-grown meat alternatives are increasingly gaining attention, Vow hoped to draw attention to cutting edge possibilities via resurrecting the iconic Ice Age giant in miniature, meatball form.

[Related: FDA says this lab-grown chicken is safe for human consumption.]

Despite the wild conceit, concocting the mammoth meatball apparently proved to be “ridiculously easy and fast,” said Ernst Wolvetang, a professor at the University of Queensland’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering who worked alongside the cultivated meatmakers. What’s more, it only took a “couple weeks” for Wolvetang’s team to harvest the approximately 20 billion mammoth-elephant meat cells grown within sheep myoblast stem cells.

For author Lincoln Michel, the news came as surprise. “It’s maybe a cliché at this point, but it’s very hard these days for satire to keep up with reality,” he told PopSci. Michel’s 2021 sci-fi novel, The Body Scout, cheekily mentions lab grown cuisine derived from long-extinct animal species against a dystopian, cyberpunk backdrop. “When I wrote The Body Scout, I thought adding mammoth burgers and teriyaki tyrannosaur wings would be a funny comment on the banality of modern capitalism’s vision,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see mammoth snacks a mere two years after publication.”

[Related: How to enjoy fake meat in a way that actually helps the planet.]

Vow already has plans to supply Singapore restaurants by the end of the year with lab-cultivated Japanese quail grown using similar methods. Additionally, the company has reportedly researched over 50 other species to add to their menu, including buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, and various fish species. Dodo apparently was researchers’ first choice, but didn’t make the cut because they lacked the necessary DNA sequences.

But don’t expect to take part in mammoth taste tests for the conceivable future. As Wolvetang told The Guardian, humans haven’t ingested mammoth protein for thousands of years, so there’s no telling how immune systems would handle such a dish. Instead, the meatball is meant more as a representation of what the cultivated animal protein industry hopes to achieve. If the same methods continue to be applied to commonly eaten animals, then entirely new avenues for nutrition may become available to consumers. As one researcher explained to The Guardian, “By cultivating beef, pork, chicken and seafood we can have the most impact in terms of reducing emissions from conventional animal agriculture.”

Meanwhile, Paleo—a “precision fermentation company” based in Belgium—alleges Vow’s claims as the first to develop meat with mammoth myoglobin is false. “When we learned about [Vow’s announcement], we were surprised,” Hermes Sanctorum, CEO of Paleo, said in a statement provided to PopSci. “We sent out a press release nine months ago to announce that we developed the exact same mammoth protein (myoglobin), based on our fundamental research and innovation.”

Paleo representatives claim to have reached out to Vow prior to their product announcement. Vow allegedly responded by saying its mammoth meatball “was not food,” and dismissed Paleo’s concerns. “When Vow claim that no one has tasted mammoth myoglobin, this is simply not true,” said Sanctorum, adding that, “We developed the mammoth myoglobin and we tasted it in our lab.”

Sanctorum describes the mammoth protein’s “aromatic profile” as “stronger” than other species, meaning it both “smells and tastes meatier” with a “more vibrant” red coloring. Paleo claims it submitted patent applications that have been under review and available publicly for competitors nearly a year ago. In an email to PopSci, a representative for Vow denied the accusations, stating their mammoth meatball was “conceived, developed and created entirely by the hard work and ingenuity of Vow’s own scientists [and collaborators] and using a combination of publicly available genetic data and Vow’s own proprietary production processes,” and stated it will take “appropriate” responses to maintain “its reputation, its innovations, and its people.”

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Bottled water is one of the most popular beverages in the world. In the United States, bottled water has outsold carbonated soft drinks every year since 2016. Currently, the global bottled water market is worth $270 billion, and it’s projected to exceed $500 billion by the end of the decade. Only three countries combined make up almost half of the global market: the USA, China, and Indonesia.

Despite its widespread consumption, bottled water might actually slow the progress of providing universal access to safe drinking water, according to a recent report from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health (UNU-INWEH).

Bottled water can foster distrust of and distract attention from clean tap water

The report argues that the rapidly-growing bottled water industry may have an adverse impact on the investments in long-term public water supply infrastructure development and improvement. The expansion of the bottled water market may distract governmental efforts to provide safe drinking water for all, says Zeineb Bouhlel, study author and research and communication associate at the UNU-INWEH.

“In certain countries such as Mexico and Indonesia, the industry is somehow reducing the role of the state in providing safe water for the population,” says Bouhlel. “When bottled water is popular, the government may spend less effort and less financial resources to make the public water supply available for all and of better quality.”

According to the report, the drivers of the bottled water market aren’t the same around the world. In the Global North, people drink bottled water because they don’t trust tap water and believe the former is healthier. However, individuals in the Global South are primarily motivated by the lack or absence of a reliable public water supply.

[Related: Sorting and recycling plastic is notoriously hard—but this AI could help.]

“In many places, bottled water is an important source of safe drinking water absent adequate public water supply systems,” says Sara Hughes, water policy expert and associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “But the bottled water industry actively encourages distrust of tap water, which does erode public support and investment in public drinking water systems even where the water is available and safe to drink.”

The idea that bottled water is unquestionably safer than tap water must be challenged. The quality of bottled water can be compromised by the origin of the water or the industrial processes it goes through, the report says. For example, commercially-bottled water labeled “mineral water” or “spring water” isn’t guaranteed to be free of Cryptosporidium (Crypto) parasites, the second highest cause of reported waterborne disease outbreaks in 2015.

Globally, tap water is much more regulated and monitored than bottled water, with the latter having less sampling and no obligation to disclose information on the content or the process for some types and in certain countries, says Bouhlel.

The growing bottled water industry may distract attention and resources from the development of public water supply systems, when, in reality, less than half of what the world pays for bottled water every year is enough to ensure clean tap water access for millions of people without it for years to come.

The bottled water industry’s impact on the environment

The bottled water industry may have negative effects on the environment through the whole supply chain, from water extraction to packaging disposal, says Bouhlel. For instance, it contributes to the pressure on water resources and may increase water scarcity at a local level, he adds.

“Bottled water can place additional burden on aquifers, rivers, and streams, unless withdrawals are properly accounted for,” says Hughes. “In most parts of the U.S., and globally, we lack tools to accurately track and measure how an additional withdrawal—such as for bottled water—affects aquatic ecosystems, and the ability to regulate withdrawals from shared aquifers in particular.”

The production of plastics and the logistics of delivering the product to the consumer also come at the price of greenhouse gas emissions, says Bouhlel. The manufacturing of bottled water is very fossil-fuel intensive. A 2009 Environmental Research Letters study estimated the energy footprint of the various phases of bottled water production and found that it requires about 5.6 and 10.2 million joules of energy per liter, about 2000 times the energy cost of producing tap water.

[Related: Groundwater is an incredible resource. It’s time to treat it like one.]

“Environmental impacts may also be seen at the stage of disposal, where more than 80 percent of bottled water is packaged in plastic and PET containers, and where the recycling rate so far is very low at a global level,” he adds. Plastic bottles often end up in landfills and bodies of water, harming natural ecosystems and biodiversity.

Improving access to drinking water supply in the US

The United States has one of the safest public water supplies in the world. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for ensuring that public water systems meet the standards for drinking water quality. “[T]he majority of Americans do not need to purchase more expensive and environmentally harmful bottled water to meet their needs,” says Hughes. “That said, there are communities in the U.S. that do lack safe and reliable drinking water and that is completely unacceptable.”

A 2021 Nature Communications study reported that over a thousand community water systems are considered “serious violators” of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Moreover, about 48 percent of households on Indian reservations don’t have access to clean water. Residents of Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan have all been affected by a major water supply crisis in recent years as well.

According to Hughes, there are three significant drinking water supply challenges in the US, and they can all be addressed with federal investment: ensuring the old drinking water systems are maintained and kept in compliance, providing safe drinking water access in Tribal communities, and addressing drinking water quality and access problems facing rural communities.

“Communities need resources to upgrade and repair aging systems and replace lead service lines, and increasing water rates to cover these costs will not be feasible in all places,” says Hughes. “Tribal communities are in need of significant and long-overdue infrastructure investment.”

Rural communities, which face challenges related to declining water supplies and contaminated water sources, might require a mix of funding and regulatory solutions. This can include restricting agricultural runoff, exploring regionalization opportunities for rural water systems, and investing in technical capacities in these systems and their personnel, says Hughes.

In 2018, the EPA published its Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment and reported that the country needs about $472.6 billion to maintain and improve drinking water infrastructure over the next 20 years. It would be used to replace or improve deteriorating pipelines, expand infrastructure to reduce water contamination, and construct water storage reservoirs.

“Some of the most important policy changes could have more to do with how drinking water systems are funded and organized,” says Hughes, “rather than only ramping up regulatory requirements.”

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The sci-fi concept is so ubiquitous it’s practically its own trope: walk into the kitchen, press a button on a futuristic machine, and poof, dinner is instantaneously laser-assembled for your family. While (incredibly simple) 3D-printed food has actually been a reality for nearly two decades, the same group that first showcased its potential has recently taken one of its largest steps forward to date—cheesecake.

As detailed in an article published on Tuesday in npj Science of Food, researchers at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab pulled off printing and laser-cooking a tasty-looking, seven ingredient slice of cake made from edible “food inks” including peanut butter, nutella, and strawberry jam. Although still in its very early stages, the novel technique could prove extremely helpful for improving meals’ nutritional contents, as well as raising the bar for food safety.

[Related: How to enjoy fake meat in a way that actually helps the planet.]

Prior iterations of 3D-printed food have been comparatively rudimentary, and combined only a couple ingredients. The researchers’ cheesecake recipe—which also features a graham cracker crust, cherry jam, and even frosting—represents a sizable leap forward in what can be created in a cutting-edge kitchen. But unlike traditional cooking, 3D-printed and laser-cooked concoctions may often require “novel ingredient compositions and structures, due to the different way by which the food is ‘assembled,’” said Hod Lipson, one of the paper’s co-authors and a roboticist focused on AI and digital manufacturing.

The culinary experimenters tested their 3D-printing methods by literally constructing various iterations of cheesecake with different layer structures and compositions. After trial and error, the group found that graham cracker bases for each layer proved to be the sturdiest, on which the Nutella and peanut butter “pools” hosted the jam and frosting.

[Related: Best 3D printers of 2023.]

As difficult as this may sound compared to simply throwing ingredients in a mixer, the team thinks this artificial avenue could be practical for researchers in the plant-based meat industry tinkering on chemical and molecular levels to accurately mimic the real thing. For those with swallowing issues stemming from neurological maladies and other conditions, food-shaped pureed dishes could offer an extremely beneficial new option. Given that the printing relies on high-energy targeted laser light for heating, the actual cooking process could soon be both sustainable and economical.

Still, a lot still needs to be in place for a 3D-printed food industry to truly take shape, such as recipe files and food cartridge manufacturers, not to mention a consumer base who finds the enterprise appetizing. Coming out the gate with a peanut butter-Nutella cheesecake is a pretty great way to pique interests—as well as hunger levels.

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This article was originally published on Saveur.

Eating disorders run in my family. Recently, a cousin died of one. It wasn’t just how much he ate but what: cola, chips, and candy round the clock. He basically snacked himself to death on a diet that led to heart disease, diabetes, and other complications. One reason he might have made unhealthy food choices is counterintuitive: He couldn’t stay full. “Food that is mainly carbohydrates or high in sugar is palatable. It goes down easily. It’s lower in volume, or water content, so you can eat a lot before your stomach expands,” explains Cara Harbstreet, a dietitian and the founder of Street Smart Nutrition. “But it doesn’t carry the fiber or other things that contribute to fullness and slow down eating.” 

You know that stuffed feeling after polishing off a steak or a bowl of pea soup? Experts call it satiety. In 1995, Australian nutritionists devised a satiety index to track which foods made us feel fullest. Feeding subjects different foods and monitoring their hunger afterward, the researchers found foods with the lowest satiety were carb-and-sugar bombs. These are delicious, but their dopamine rewards amount to empty calories. 

Foods with high satiety—those that keep you fullest the longest—are “high-thermic,” says food scientist Dr. Taylor C. Wallace, meaning that “muscles in the stomach and intestines take a lot of energy to break them down.” Chief among high-thermic foods is protein. “The body spends almost 30 percent of the calories it takes in from a protein trying to digest it.” 

After protein on the high-thermic scale, there’s fat, which slows the body’s absorption of carbohydrates. Anyone who loves toast slathered in butter knows how fat carries flavor, which begets satiety and satisfaction. Then comes fiber—the roughage that makes whole grains, fruit, vegetables, and legumes harder (in a good way) to digest. High-fiber foods often contain lots of water, which further fills your belly. 

That’s the gist of satiety: There are foods that take their time in your gut, and foods that don’t. “Generally, whole foods make you feel full longer than processed ones,” says dietitian nutritionist Kylene Bogden, a dietitian and functional sports nutrition expert who works with professional athletes. 

But every expert I spoke with cautioned against using the satiety index as a diet plan. Diets, they say, don’t work. “Clinical studies show minimal, if any, effect,” Wallace notes. And the satiety index has only been used in a limited way in labs; it hasn’t been applied to a broad study of actual, everyday behavior, where its efficacy can really be tested.

Still, the concept of satiety is useful. “If you eat a doughnut, and your brain’s happy, you can understand why your stomach still wants a meal. If you eat fish and vegetables, and your body is happy, you know why your brain still wants the doughnut,” says Ariane Resnick, a special-diet chef and nutritionist whose clients have included Gwyneth Paltrow and P!nk. 

Makes sense to me. In a world where celebrities are clamoring for weight-loss short-cuts like taking Ozempic and other diabetes drugs to suppress their appetites, and where others, like my cousin, refuse to take care of their diabetes and go for broke on unhealthful foods, paying attention to fullness seems like a sober and balanced approach to eating. The pros I spoke with have pointers for thinking about the satiety index. 

Don’t mistake satiety for healthfulness

“You could eat a Wendy’s triple cheeseburger without the bun, and that’s high satiety, but it’s not healthy,” says Wallace. “You’ll see weight loss, but did you raise your bad cholesterol or give yourself hypertension?” Satiety can, however, help avoid the pitfalls of calorie counting. “You could starve yourself slamming low-cal Ritz Cracker packs that spike your blood sugar level. Then you’re hungry, can’t lose weight, and have no energy,” says Bogden. “Foods that are slower to digest keep blood sugar more stable.”

Go for satisfaction

Resnick isn’t a fan of steamed vegetables. “Roasted under a chicken or stir fried, vegetables are more appealing,” she says. If you agree with her, then you’re more inclined to eat your veggies with some fat on them. As it turns out, some vitamins are fat soluble; your body can’t access them unless the veggies are glistening in chicken drippings. “So think about what gives you satisfaction as well as nutrition. We do better listening to our bodies than to ideology.”

Diversify your plate

Protein, fat, and fiber: Satiety requires all three. “If one is missing, that leads to hunger,” Harbstreet explains. “You end up dissatisfied and might rummage around for something else to munch on.” That means combining colors, textures, and flavors at every meal as much as possible. 

Resist dogma

“You’ll probably need more than fish and vegetables because, typically, those foods don’t give you the most joy and satisfaction, as they’re not full of sugar, salt, or fat, which are emotional triggers,” says Resnick. “So add a carbohydrate if you like.” If refined carbs (like white bread or pasta) make you happy, start there, then give less-refined carbs (like brown rice and pulses) a try. 

Be proactive

Fully eliminating low-satiety foods is impossible. We aren’t robots, after all. Rather than abstinence, Harbstreet recommends a measured, mindful approach: “If you’re going to a birthday party, be strategic. Have a balanced meal beforehand, then go ahead and eat some cake.” It’s not about hard rights and wrongs. Make your choices on a “cake-by-cake” basis.

Write your own story

Get to know yourself through your eating. “Start with what you normally eat and keep a journal of how you’re feeling, and how full you are, 30 minutes, one hour, and two hours from eating,” suggests Bogden. Did your energy dip? Do you want to eat more? “Then gravitate to higher satiety foods, and journal again.” If journaling is dredging up bad feelings, go see a professional who can help you use satiety and other tools in a way that works for your mind and body. “None are the be-all, end-all,” says Resnick. “Every tool is something to consider to find what’s best for you.”

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People often adjust their diets to keep themselves healthy—but what about changing what we eat for the health of the planet? It appears that some popular meal plans, such as ketogenic and Paleolithic diets, aren’t very good for Earth or for your wellness, according to a recent study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition  looked into the environmental impact and nutrition quality of food commodities.

Our food choices can have major consequences: What we eat contributes about a third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, when accounting for agriculture and land use, supply chain, and our dietary habits. Given food’s huge impact on climate change, it’s important that dietary patterns become more sustainable. This begins with identifying the food choices that are environmentally friendly, which is exactly what the study sought to find out.

“Given that many people are experimenting with different diets, it’s helpful to have a sense of the differences in their impacts,” says Diego Rose, study author and director of nutrition at Tulane University. “What individuals choose to eat sends signals to producers about what to produce, so individual behaviors can affect what gets produced and thus the impacts from our overall food production.”

Going vegan benefits the environment

The new research assessed the carbon footprint and quality of six popular diets, namely: vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, Paleolithic, ketogenic, and omnivore (which, basically, is the diet of everyone else). Vegans, as defined by the study, ate very little meat and dairy: less than 0.5 ounces of the former and less than 0.25 cups of the latter each day. Meanwhile, vegetarians ate less than 0.5 ounces of meat, poultry, and seafood combined; a pescatarian diet was similar to a vegetarian one, but included seafood.

[Related: How to eat sustainably without sacrificing your favorite foods.]

Those who consumed meat but ate less than 0.5 ounces of grains and legumes per day, and less than 0.25 cups of dairy, followed the Paleo diet. People who have a keto diet eat less than 50 grams of net carbohydrates. The authors allowed minimal amounts of some typically excluded foods to account for any minor deviations or accidental consumption of ingredients that the respondent might not have known.

The findings showed that Paleo and keto are among the highest in carbon emissions and lowest in nutrition quality. The researchers estimated these diets produce about 2.6 and almost 3 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every 1,000 calories consumed, respectively. Meanwhile, a vegan diet was the best for the environment, which generates about 0.7 kg of carbon dioxide for the same number of calories. The amount of dietary GHG emissions significantly decreased when meats are replaced with plant proteins.

A vegetarian diet produces the second lowest emissions at 1.16 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every 1,000 calories consumed, the study authors found. Pescatarian and omnivore diets fared in the middle, generating about 1.66 and 2.23 kilograms of carbon dioxide for the same number of calories, respectively.

The scientists reviewed the diets of more than 16,000 adults, collected by the National Center for Health Statistics’ nationally representative National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Rose and his co-authors’ also created their own database of environmental impacts of food commodities, which they linked to the national dataset to calculate the impact of each food item consumed. This allowed the authors to compute an average carbon footprint for each diet type.

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

The study shows, in line with previous research, that eating less animal-based food is best for the planet. Consumers have the greatest influence in reducing carbon emissions from the food system by shifting their diets to lower carbon-intensive foods, says Gregory A. Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study. For example, a change away from meat altogether could reduce food-related emissions by up to 73 percent. Additionally, if global food production shifted to plant-based diets by 2050, there could also be sequestration of 366 to 603 gigatons of carbon dioxide from native vegetation regrowth in areas currently occupied by animal agriculture.

“All animal-based foods combined—red meat, poultry, fish or seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats—represent 82 percent of the baseline diet carbon footprint,” says Keoleian. “Plant-based proteins such as legumes, soy products, and nuts and seeds will dramatically reduce impacts.”

Considering foods’ environmental impact

As of 2018, about 5 percent of Americans are vegetarian, and only 2 percent have a vegan diet. “Taste and price, along with cultural and social backgrounds, are more important for most consumers’ decision-making about food, [rather] than health or the environment,” says Rose.

To encourage consumers to shift to environmentally friendly diets, he says policymakers could start by educating the public about the environmental impacts of food, either through dietary recommendations or food labels. One recent study found that around 16 percent of a nationally representative sample might be receptive to changing their diet to follow environmentally sustainable guidelines.

[Related: Eating seafood can be more sustainable and healthy than red meat.]

The Agriculture Department’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025 that provides recommendations on what to consume to support good health, reduce the risk of chronic disease, and meet nutrient needs may play a role. Keoleian says these guidelines can be expanded to include information about the environmental impact of diets, which is relevant because climate change influences human health, too. Reducing diet-related emissions by making better food choices may lead to improved health, mostly by helping reduce air pollution. 

Applying a carbon tax that raises the price of carbon-intensive foods may encourage consumers to opt for lower-impact foods, says Keoleian. But if this were to happen, programs that assist lower-income households—like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—would be critical since the access and affordability of nutritious food is “particularly problematic,” he adds.

They could also enact programs that subsidize greener food production, promote more sustainable versions of livestock, and offer alternatives to animal-based foods, says Rose. Furthermore, restaurants can place more sustainable foods higher up on the menu and develop new recipes with less meat but more flavor,  he adds.

To make it easier for consumers to shift to environmentally sustainable diets, a whole-of-society approach is needed, Rose says—one that includes policymakers, restaurants, food producers, and eaters, too.

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If you’ve ever been to a fancy tequila bar, you may have hear of an alcoholic drink distilled from agave called mezcal. The smoky-tasting dram is surging in popularity around the world— it’s estimated that the global sales for the beverage will jump from $338 million in 2022 to $2115 million by 2031. Around 70 percent of all mezcal is distilled in the southwestern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. One thing that separates mezcal from the other bottles of hard liquor on the shelf are the worms commonly found inside them. 

[Related: City lights could trigger a baby boom for some moths and butterflies.]

There are some theories as to why the worm is there, especially since they appear to be a relatively recent addition to the drink that dates back to the 17th century. Indigenous Mexicans have been adding larvae to food for ages, but one theory posits that Jacobo Lozano Páez, a distiller who found that adding the creature changed the taste of the agave and began adding it to his spirits in 1940. Some other popular theories center around the belief that the larva brings good luck to the person who finds it in a glass, and a study from 2013 found that adding larvae to is mostly driven by the belief that the larva are healthy and are aphrodisiacs.

In a small study published March 8 in the journal PeerJ Life & Environment, a team of researchers from the United States, Canada, and Switzerland looked to identify what species of larva are found in  bottles of mezcal. They wanted to see if drinkers were consuming the larvae of the aptly nicknamed tequila giant skipper butterfly (Aegiale hesperiaris), the moth Comadia redtenbacheri, a weevil, or a completely unidentified insect species. 

The results were somewhat surprising. All of the larvae in the specimens obtained from 21 commercially available mezcals purchased between 2018 and 2022 were from the moth C. redtenbacheri, despite about 63 species of larvae being widely consumed in Mexico. 

The team used DNA analysis of larvae to determine their identity. Additionally, all of the larvae appeared very similar on the surface, with prolegs and a distinct head capsule. They also variety from pinkish red to white in color.

[Related: Five burning questions about tequila, answered.]

In response to a declining number of larvae available to add to mezcal, the team in this study believes that new cultivation methods for larvae in captivity are needed. researchers have begun to develop methods to cultivate these larvae in captivity, but that can be a challenge. 

“There is still very little known about how best to rear mezcal larvae and additional scientific research is needed to understand how captive insect breeding can become a central part of the agricultural industry in Mexico,” the team writes in the study. 

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YOU’RE WALKING through a forest. The soil is soft beneath your feet, and the sun is shining brightly through the dark green treetops. To your left, you see rotten logs with dense clusters of oyster mushrooms. On your right, a thick bundle of chanterelles sprouts from the leaf-littered floor. Farther off the beaten path are stout-looking porcinis, frequently with a colony of poisonous fly agarics nearby, and, maybe, a bunch of magic blue gyms—those might ruin your nature walk, though. 

The mushroom kingdom holds many shapes and secrets beyond those of the little white buttons and baby bellas found at the grocery store. Ethical foraging is one of the easiest and most valuable ways to incorporate an array of mushrooms into your life; to get started, you can join a mycology group or contact a local guide to learn how to harvest edible fungi safely and sustainably. 

But there are more creative ways to incorporate the power of mushrooms into your days. Fungi are a versatile and adaptable group, which is why they offer a range of benefits to a variety of people. They’re a multifaceted food source, providing fiber, protein, and other nutrients. They can be used to create dyes, build structures, or breed new strains of mushrooms. In essence, they’re really cool, and they’re inspiring biologists, artists, and engineers to develop practices that can make the world prosper. Here’s a mini-tour of what the flourishing field of mushrooming has to offer.

Shopping for mushrooms 

Head to the supplement aisle in any health food store, and you’re bound to find shelf space dedicated to the medicinal wonder of mushrooms. Research on fruit flies and mice shows that cordyceps, popular among consumers (and apocalyptic TV shows), has anti-cancer properties and possibly anti-aging effects, too. Reishi and turkey tail are coveted for their potential immune-stimulating effects, while lion’s mane may help soften dementia, according to a small pilot study.  

Most of these benefits have been investigated on animals or in test tubes, making it challenging to draw conclusions on human health. If you’re looking for guaranteed results, it’s better to grab fresh, whole mushrooms from the produce section than spend all your money on pills and potions. 

“Eating food is always safer and less expensive than using its supplemental form,” says Lori Chong, a registered dietitian at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. With fungi, you should know which edible varieties are good to cook with. Reishi and turkey tail are not commonly used for culinary purposes because their tough texture and bitter taste make them unpalatable. On the other hand, lion’s mane, shiitake, enoki, and maitake make fine ingredients for a meal, each with its distinct flavors and properties. 

A steady intake of mushrooms can work wonders for our bodies. Eating 18 grams daily could reduce someone’s cancer risk by 45 percent, according to a scientific review of 17 observational studies. Using mushrooms to lessen meat consumption can also help reduce the risk of heart disease by lowering saturated fat in a diet—you can do this by mixing chewy stems and caps with ground meat. And they’re one of a few sources of ergothioneine, an amino acid with anti-inflammatory effects, according to several international medical papers. 

Getting them into your diet isn’t too difficult, says Chong. “Mushrooms make a great addition to any combination of stir-fried vegetables,” she explains. “They are easy to prep and quick to cook. Consider sautéing a package of mushrooms and keeping them in the refrigerator to add to an omelet, spaghetti sauce, sandwich, or salad.” 

Oh, and don’t eat them raw: Farmed mushrooms may contain agaritine, a toxic compound destroyed by heat during the cooking process. Research has found that certain store-bought varieties have less agaritine than freshly picked ones, but questions remain.

When shopping for whole mushrooms, make sure they’re firm to the touch, smooth, and dry on the surface. You don’t want any that look dried out, feel slimy, have big spots of discoloration, or show wet spots. Once you get home, store them in the fridge in a loose bag or a glass container with the lid cracked to prevent moisture buildup and fast spoilage.   

Dyeing with mushrooms 

Though they’re certainly delicious, there’s much more you can do with mushrooms than eat them, including making pigments for fabric dyes, ink, and all varieties of paint. In fact, the vastness of the fungus kingdom covers every color of the rainbow, says Julie Beeler, a naturalist, teacher, and artist. “Mushrooms contain a variety of different chemical compounds that create colors ranging from red to yellow to blue and colors in between,” says Beeler. “These pigments can be found throughout the mushroom, but for certain species like Cortinarius semisanguineus [the surprise webcap], the color is concentrated in the caps. For Hydnellum caeruleum [the blue and orange hydnellum], the color is throughout the mushroom. And for Hypomyces lactifluorum [the lobster mushroom], it is only the parasitized outer layer.”

Beeler created the website Mushroom Color Atlas as an educational resource for people who want to use mushrooms to make hues. She walks beginners through the process of extracting dyes from 28 fungal varieties that are common in the wild, and she intends to add another 13 in the coming months. Those few dozen specimens can produce more than 800 colors, she notes.

While the practice is growing in popularity, it has centuries of history. Fungi, particularly lichens—complex organisms created by a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an alga—have been used in cultural practices across North America, North Africa, Asia, and Europe. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, all pigments were processed naturally. Since then, pretty much every dyed item we encounter has been colored using synthetic dyes. “Mushrooms allow you to get back to natural practices that are more regenerative and sustainable for the environment and the planet as a whole,” says Beeler. 

To stain fabrics, she explains, you need a pot, similar to one for making tea. Beeler suggests cutting the fungi into smaller pieces and steeping them for about an hour in hot, but not boiling, water. (A temperature of about 160 degrees Fahrenheit will prevent the compounds from degrading.) When the color of the water has changed, you can dip natural fibers in to dye them. 

The look of your final product will depend on the mushrooms you use and your material. Wool tends to absorb more vibrant, bolder shades from the organisms than other textiles. Cotton, the world’s most widely used fiber, is surprisingly more complicated because it’s cellulose-based and requires a lengthier mordanting process to fix the chemicals to the threads. “You’ll need to be a lot more advanced to get really great colors on cotton,” says Beeler, “but you can get some incredible colors with wool.” 

If you’re not getting the look you want, you can alter the pH of the dye bath depending on what the mushroom you’re working with responds to best. Certain species prefer more acidic environments, so you can add vinegar to produce an orange tinge. Or for greater alkalinity, add a sprinkle of sodium carbonate to get a vibrant blue or green. The hues might fade over time with repeated washing or exposure to sunlight, unless you use a mordant like alum to bind them to the fibers.

The best part is that you can find your main materials almost anywhere: while moving dead limbs around your yard, during a walk through the park, or perched upon a strip of grass in a parking lot after a good rain. Some will look like the mushrooms you get from the grocery store, with the expected gills underneath; others will have more novel structures. Boletes, such as the spring king, have a spongy cap and produce a range of beautiful earth tones. Some false gill mushrooms deliver a spectrum of blues, greens, and yellows, depending on which you grab. Tooth fungi have fanglike spines and often produce blues or greens. Another excellent clue to the dyeing potential of a mushroom is whether it’s colorful inside and out. The lobster mushroom, for example, makes a variety of pinks and reds, true to its name. 

“I just love that as I’m walking in different environments, every step I’m taking, I’m thinking about that fungal underground in the soil and the mycelium, this web of connections creating a rainbow beneath my feet,” Beeler says. 

Building on mushrooms

Creating structures with mycelium—the network of fungal filaments that allows mushrooms to grow aboveground—is an exercise in simulating the layers in natural ecosystems. The practice is a chance to think of the presence of trash as an opportunity to create something new. “In the living world, there isn’t really such a thing as waste,” says Merlin Sheldrake, the author of Entangled Life, a bestselling book on mycology. Scraps are always used to create something else, like a scavenger breaking down a carcass. “Are there ways that we can learn from those cyclical processes to behave more like other living organisms do?” Sheldrake continues. “Or will we continue just to produce stuff and then put it in landfills?” 

Building with fungi is a relatively new field that’s in a state of expansion. Mycelium can be used to create packaging, clothing, and even buildings; researchers are working on making the materials more robust and streamlining production. BioHAB, an architectural project in Namibia, for instance, is salvaging the remains of cleared encroacher bush, an indigenous species that drastically reduces usable land and resources, to create a substrate for farming mushrooms. The waste from cultivating the fungi is then compacted into eco-friendly bricks. The end product is strong, flexible, insulative, and soundproof, and can be used to reinforce structures in local villages, BioHAB’s website states. 

Similarly, NASA is looking into mycelium-based construction materials for astronaut dwellings on the moon and Mars. These composites are light and transportable, protect better against radiation, could self-replicate in their new environments for an endless resource, and, at the end of their life spans, can be turned into fertilizer.

Working with mushroom structures encourages builders to think about the whole cycle of production. “If you’re growing composite material using mycelium and hemp, for example, then you think about where the hemp is coming from,” Sheldrake explains. “Then you start thinking about the fact that you are harnessing a waste stream from another industry to produce the feedstock to grow the fungus.” 

Accessing mycotecture at the consumer level is a bit more complicated, but more opportunities are sprouting up. If you want to wear your mushrooms, luxury fashion houses like Stella McCartney, Balenciaga, and Hermès are experimenting with mycelium leather. In 2021 Hermès introduced a bag in partnership with MycoWorks, a company that develops leatherlike materials in a variety of colors from reishi. 

Pivoting to mushrooms could, in part, help buffer the effect industrialization has on the planet. Manufacturing is a major cause of environmental degradation, pollution, carbon emissions, and waste. Mushroom-sourced components can offer a break from petrochemicals and plastics if they can be produced sustainably enough and brought to scale. But the field, which is still in its infancy, has a ways to go before it can make an earnest contribution to the use of sustainable goods. 

“These fungal materials are exciting when you step back and look at how all these different industries go together and the possibilities that exist between them,” says Sheldrake. “Unless we rethink the way that we build and produce, then we are going to be in even bigger trouble than we already are.” 

Growing your own mushrooms

When Tavis Lynch started raising mushrooms in the early 1990s, he approached it as a hobby before expanding into more complicated projects, eventually becoming a professional mycologist and commercial cultivator. He currently grows 20 indoor and outdoor mushroom varieties employing genetic pairing—creating new strains of mushrooms by mating spores from two existing varieties. 

Lynch has made a fruitful career out of something people can do at home. A DIY venture doesn’t have to be complicated. “There are a lot of different ways to grow mushrooms,” Lynch explains. “We can grow them on wheat or oat straw. We can grow them on natural logs. We can grow them on compost. We can even grow them on blended substrates that we create, typically an enriched sawdust or coffee grounds.” 

Most varieties of mushrooms bred at home are used for cooking or medicine. But the first thing to assess is the resources available where you live. Coffee grounds, compost, or sawdust will be the best substrates for anyone living in a major metropolitan area where green space is limited or tightly regulated. For those budding hobbyists, going the kitchen counter route with a tabletop kit, rearing specimens in a basement, or even hanging them somewhere in your shower will be your best bet. (Choosing a shaded, humid spot is the most important element.)

Once you’ve figured out the logistics, including what type of mushroom you want to farm, Lynch suggests finding a spawn supplier—a step that, like growing the fungi, won’t be too hard. “They’re popping up left and right every day because the trend toward home cultivation of mushrooms is massive right now,” he says. Companies such as Tavis’s Mushrooms, North Spore, Field & Forest Products, Earth Angel Mushrooms, and Mushroom Queens offer online ordering and quick shipping across the US.

I ordered a pink oyster mushroom kit online from Forest Origins. Starting the growth process was as simple as Lynch had said it would be: All I had to do was cut into the substrate bag, disturb some of the top layer with a fork, dampen it, and place it on my counter to get indirect sunlight. Then, twice a day, I came by and spritzed it with a water bottle. I started seeing fruiting bodies develop about a week into this daily ritual. Sadly, I accidentally sprayed it with bleach while cleaning and had to order another kit. 

Bleaching aside, checking on my baby mushrooms felt as good as tending to my other plants. Ensuring they had enough sun and moisture gave me a few minutes of grounding amid chaotic days. It was a reminder that nearly everything provided to us by this Earth is beautiful and useful.

“Getting out, working with your hands, having a distraction from your digital devices and from the noise of others and the city—that’s the real medicine,” says Lynch. “I’m looking out my window right now at my mushroom farm, and I wish I was out there working on it.” 

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The U.S. Defense Department issued a memo on Feb. 17, 2023, warning service members to avoid eating poppy seeds because doing so may result in a positive urine test for the opiate codeine. Addiction and pain medicine specialist Gary Reisfield explains what affects the opiate content of poppy seeds and how they could influence drug tests.

What are poppy seeds?

Poppy seeds come from a species of poppy plant called Papaver somniferum. “Somniferum” is Latin for “sleep-bringing,” which hints that it might contain opiates – powerful compounds that depress the central nervous system and can induce drowsiness and sleep.

There are two main uses for the opium poppy. It is a source of the opiates used in painkillers, the most biologically active of which are morphine and codeine. Its seeds are also used for cooking and baking.

Poppy seeds themselves don’t contain opiates. But during harvesting, the seeds can become contaminated with opiates contained in the milky latex of the seed pod covering them.

What affects opiate content in poppy seeds?

Many factors determine the opiate concentrations and ratios of poppies. As with wine grapes, the opiate profile of the poppy plant – and thus its seeds – is affected by its terroir: climate, soil, amount of sunshine, topography and time of harvest.

Another factor is the variety or cultivar of the plant. For example, there are genetically engineered opium poppies that produce no morphine or codeine and others that produce no opium latex at all.

Can you get high from eating poppy seeds?

Practically speaking, you cannot eat enough poppy seeds to get you high. Furthermore, processing dramatically decreases opiate content – for example, by washing or cooking or baking the seeds.

Do poppy seeds affect drug tests?

Poppy seeds don’t have nearly enough opiates to intoxicate you. But because drug tests are exquisitely sensitive, consuming certain poppy seed food products can lead to positive urine drug test results for opiates – specifically for morphine, codeine or both.

Under most circumstances, opiate concentrations in the urine are too low to produce a positive test result. But certain food products – and it’s generally impossible to know which ones, because opiate content does not appear on food labels – contain enough opiates to produce positive test results. Moreover, because of overlap in opiate concentrations and morphine-to-codeine ratios, it can sometimes be challenging to distinguish test results that are due to the consumption of poppy seeds from those that are due to the use of opiate drugs.

This is not a problem with most workplace drug testing. Test results are reviewed by a specially trained physician called a medical review officer. Unless the physician finds evidence of unauthorized opiate use, such as needle marks or signs of opiate intoxication or withdrawal, even relatively high concentrations of opiates in the urine that produce positive test results are generally ruled to be negative.

It turns out, though, that drug testing in the military is different, and poppy seeds pose potential problems. One such problem, as highlighted in recent news reports, concerns service members who test positive for codeine and assert a “poppy seed defense.” They are still regarded as having taken codeine, sometimes with serious consequences, such as a disciplinary action or discharge from the service.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Animal feed plays a major role in the environmental impact of your diet. In dairy and beef production, it accounts for about 36 and 55 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, respectively. The raw materials for animal feed typically consist of crops like soybean and wheat and animal-based products like fish meal and fish oil. But the production of these ingredients could be detrimental to the environment. 

About 33 percent of croplands are dedicated to livestock feed production, which may result in nutrient and pesticide runoff. Crops for animal feed also make up about six percent of the GHG emissions from global food production. Meanwhile, increasing demand for feed made from marine byproducts may be unsustainable for ocean ecosystems.

“When we feed these ingredients to animals that have their own environmental impact from production, the overall impact is much higher than if we just ate the ingredients themselves, “ says Caitlin D. Kuempel, conservation scientist and lecturer at the Griffith University School of Environment and Science in Australia. “The more feed required to grow an animal, the higher this overall pressure can become.” 

Global food production, including plant and animal agriculture, is estimated to make up 26 percent of the total GHG emissions around the world. Therefore, to reduce the environmental impact of animal products, it may be beneficial to look at their diets and work on making them more sustainable as well.

Animal feed production has a significant environmental impact

For many types of farmed animals, feed typically accounts for 50 to 70 percent of production costs, says Kurt A. Rosentrater, food engineer and associate professor at Iowa State University whose research focuses on improving the sustainability of agricultural-based systems. 

“Ironically, the production of feed and the ingredients that go into these feeds can often result in up to about 70 percent of the environmental impacts from eating products from these animals,” says Rosentrater. That’s not the case for all species, especially since ruminants produce significant GHG emissions during digestion. But for most animal-based products, the most significant portion of environmental impacts happen on the farm before they are even processed into food products, he adds.

[Related: Smarter fertilizer use could shrink our agricultural carbon footprint.]

For instance, animal feed given to farmed broiler chickens and farmed salmonids (including salmon, marine trout, and Arctic char) account for more than half of their respective industries’ environmental impact, according to a recent Current Biology study. Feed production accounts for at least 78 percent of the environmental pressures of farmed chicken, and over 67 percent for that of salmon.

Chicken and salmon are the largest animal-sourced food sectors on land and the sea, which makes them a fitting focus for research. “We combined data on four pressures—greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater use, nutrient pollution, and land and sea disturbance—into a single metric to get a more holistic view of the environmental footprint of these two production systems,” says Kuempel, who was involved in the study.

The findings revealed that 95 percent of the environmental footprints of chicken and salmon are concentrated in just five percent of the world, which includes some of the largest producers like the US and Chile. Knowing the spatial distribution helps give more local context. This could help identify areas that may have resource competition, and focus on location-specific policies to reduce environmental impact, says Kuempel.

Moreover, the study found that more than 85 percent of farmed chicken and salmon’s environmental footprints overlap primarily due to their shared feed ingredients. Commercial poultry feed often consists of crops like corn and wheat, but they also contain fish meal and fish oils. At the same time, salmon aquaculture requires 2.5 million tons of crops like soybean and wheat for feed, but they still eat fish meal.

“Since feed contributes such a high percentage of their environmental footprint, this is an obvious area where changes could potentially be made to lower their environmental pressures overall,” says Kuempel.

Improve the sustainability of feed production

Some actions can improve the sustainability of feed production, including changing the dietary composition of feed ingredients to include more environmentally friendly options, says Kuempel. This can be effective since the environmental impacts of feeds are primarily influenced by their ingredients.

In a 2021 study, the authors found that reducing the proportion of high-impact ingredients, like cereals and oils, while increasing the proportion of low-impact ones, like peas or fava beans, may result in eco-friendlier pig production without harming animal performance.

[Related: What the ‘B’ label on your favorite drinks and snacks means.]

The fast-growing aquaculture industry has also influenced a shift to crop-based feed ingredients to maintain sustainability in ocean ecosystems. However, for carnivorous farmed fish, plant-based diets would affect their nutritional profile, and subsequently, human nutrition. More studies are needed to understand the impact of different feed formulations on various farmed fish.

A 2020 Scientific Reports study found that reducing the fish meal component from 35 to 15 percent in the feed for the Atlantic salmon parr reduced their growth. However, partially replacing it with fish protein hydrolysate (FPH) supplementation in a high plant protein diet might result in a similar growth performance with the fish fed with a 35 percent fish meal.

Kuempel also suggests introducing novel feeds like microalgae and insects to potentially reduce environmental pressure. Microalgae could successfully replace fish meal and fish oil in aquaculture diets while also improving growth and meat quality in poultry and pigs. Feeding trials conducted on chickens, several fish species, and pigs concluded that insect meal could replace over 25 percent of soy meal or fish meal in animal feed with no adverse effects.

Overall, animal feed production has the capacity to become more sustainable. “Many researchers are hard at work trying to improve the efficiency of ingredient growth and processing, as well as improved digestibility and reduced GHG emissions during digestion,” says Rosentrater. “Many promising developments are underway that will soon reduce the impacts of feed and ingredient production, processing, and digestion.”

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A popular artificial sweetener, erythritol, has been linked to blood clotting, heart attack, stroke, and death, according to a study published February 27 in the journal Nature Medicine. Individuals with elevated factors for heart disease–such as diabetes–were twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke if their blood contained high levels of erythritol in their blood.

Erythritol and other artificial sweeteners like aspartame and saccharin are common replacements for table sugar in low-calorie, low-carbohydrate, and “keto” branded products. “Sugar-free” products like those containing erythritol are often recommended for individuals with diabetes, metabolic syndrome, or obesity and are looking for options to help manage their sugar or calorie intake. 

The product, which can be called a “natural” sweetener because it is made in very small amounts by the human body and in fruits and vegetables, has increased in popularity in recent years. A 2022 report from research firm NielsenIQ found that sales growth for products with erythritol grew by 43 percent over two years and products that claim to have “natural sweeteners” in them grew by 91 percent.

[Related: What we know about diet soda’s connection to heart disease, stroke, and early death.]

“Sweeteners like erythritol have rapidly increased in popularity in recent years but there needs to be more in-depth research into their long-term effects,” said senior author Stanley Hazen, chairman for the Department of Cardiovascular & Metabolic Sciences in Lerner Research Institute and co-section head of Preventive Cardiology at Cleveland Clinic, in a statement. “Cardiovascular disease builds over time, and heart disease is the leading cause of death globally. We need to make sure the foods we eat aren’t hidden contributors.”

In the study, the researchers looked at over 4,000 people in the United States and Europe who were undergoing cardiac evaluation. They found that subjects with higher blood erythritol levels were at elevated risk of experiencing a heart attack, stroke, or death. 

In preclinical studies, they also found some evidence erythritol increased the formation of blood clots. To do this, the team looked at the effects of adding erythritol to either whole blood or isolated platelets. These are the cell fragments that clump together to stop bleeding and contribute to blood clots. They found that erythritol made platelets easier to activate and form a clot.

“The degree of risk was not modest,” Hazen told CNN. “If your blood level of erythritol was in the top 25 percent compared to the bottom 25 percent, there was about a two-fold higher risk for heart attack and stroke. It’s on par with the strongest of cardiac risk factors, like diabetes.”

Erythritol is produced by fermenting corn and is about 70 percent as sweet as sugar. After it is eaten, it is poorly metabolized by the body and goes into the bloodstream instead. It leaves the body naturally through urine and the human body does create low amounts of erythritol naturally, so any additional consumption through diet can accumulate in the body.

[Related: Sorry, but artificial sweeteners won’t help you lose weight.]

The study’s authors note that follow-up studies are needed to confirm their findings in the general population. Additionally, the point to several limitations in the study, including that clinical observation studies demonstrate association and not causation.

“Our study shows that when participants consumed an artificially sweetened beverage with an amount of erythritol found in many processed foods, markedly elevated levels in the blood are observed for days – levels well above those observed to enhance clotting risks,” said Hazen. “It is important that further safety studies are conducted to examine the long-term effects of artificial sweeteners in general, and erythritol specifically, on risks for heart attack and stroke, particularly in people at higher risk for cardiovascular disease.”

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These days, it seems like you can make milk out of anything. But should companies be able to call the liquid made from oats, coconuts and soy beans “milk”? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released draft guidance on how food and beverage companies should label and identify plant-based milk products marketed as milk alternatives. 

The draft guidance proposes that companies can continue to use the word milk to market these dairy alternatives, but they also should include a statement that explains how the product compares nutritionally with dairy milk. One possibility is that culture alt-milk labels state that the product “contains lower amounts of vitamin D and calcium than milk” or “contains less protein than milk.”

[Related: Magnetic microrobots could zap the bacteria out of your cold glass of milk.]

The FDA writes that consumers “understand that plant-based milk alternatives do not contain milk.” The draft cites a survey of consumer comments gathered by the agency where roughly 75 percent of participants reported knowing that the products were not made with dairy. Focus group research also indicated that calling these products “milk” is “strongly rooted in consumers’ vocabulary.”

“Getting enough of the nutrients in milk and fortified soy beverages is especially important to help children grow and develop, and parents and caregivers should know that many plant-based alternatives do not have the same nutrients as milk,” said Susan T. Mayne, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, in a statement. “Food labels are an important way to help support consumer behavior, so we encourage the use of the voluntary nutritional statements to better help customers make informed decisions.”

The Good Food Institute, which advocates for plant-based products, objected to the extra labeling writing “the guidance misguidedly admonishes companies to make a direct comparison” with cow’s milk, even though key nutrients are already required to be listed. Meanwhile, chief executive of animal-free meat company BetterMeat Paul Shapiro praised the move on Twitter. 

In response, Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) issued a joint statement saying that the “misguided rule will hurt America’s dairy farmers and our rural communities.” Idaho and Wisconsin, both states with large dairy industries with a vested interest in selling cow’s milk, have been pushing for better labeling of alternative milk products. In 2017, Baldwin introduced the DAIRY PRIDE Act which would require the FDA to enforce the federal definition of milk as the “lacteal secretion … obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.” The bill has yet to pass, despite being reintroduced in 2021.

According to the FDA, 1 in 3 households in the United States reported purchasing alternative milk products in 2016, and sales of plant-based milk products rose from $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion from 2016 to 2020. 

Consumption of cow milk has decreased by nearly half in the past 50 years, according to the Department of Agriculture. As non dairy milks have surged in popularity, the cattle milk industry has been challenging the right of the plant based milk industry to call their projects milk. 

The FDA oversees “standards of identity”, legally binding definitions of products so that consumers know what they are getting when they purchase something. Another example is how some cheeses, like Kraft Singles, are labeled “cheese product” depending on pasteurization and production processes. 

In 2018, the FDA began a strategy to update these standards “in light of marketing trends and the latest nutritional science,” but milk has already had a complicated history with standards of identity. The FDA previously said that milk can generally be described as “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.” 

The dairy industry has raised concerns for two decades regarding the FDA’s policing the definition of milk amidst the rise of plant based dairy milk alternatives. Dairy producers have argued that plant-based milk companies are playing “fast and loose using standardized dairy terms,” arguing that this language use is inaccurate since the plant-based alternatives don’t have the same taste or nutritional profile as dairy milk. 

[Related: The almond milk craze could be bad news for bees.]

In response to the new draft guidelines, Jim Mulhern, head of the National Milk Producers Federation, told The Washington Post that the proposal is a “step toward labeling integrity” that acknowledges the “utter lack of nutritional standards prevalent in plant-based beverages.” He criticized the suggested guidance on terminology, emphasizing that “dairy terms are for true dairy products, not plant-based impostors.”

The debate is likely to continue as some nutritional studies are challenging dairy milk’s superiority over plant-based alternatives. A 2020 review by The New England Journal of Medicine on how milk and human health found that dairy milk did not prevent bone fractures, a common reason for suggesting milk as a healthy beverage. The study found higher rates of hip fractures in countries that consumed the highest amounts of milk and calcium.

“In reality, some plant milks are likely to be superior to cow milk,”  Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of the study told CNN. He added that soy milk has more healthy essential fatty acids than cow’s milk and that eating soy phytoestrogens in adolescence may reduce the risk of breast cancer.

The FDA is currently accepting comments on the new draft guidance and, in a statement, FDA Commissioner Robert Carliff said, “The draft recommendations issued today should lead to providing consumers with clear labeling to give them the information they need to make informed nutrition and purchasing decisions on the products they buy for themselves and their families.”

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While killer fungi might be on top of your nightmare list thanks to HBO’s The Last of Us, some mushrooms are really not all that bad—and maybe even beneficial. In fact, lion’s mane mushrooms (Hericium erinaceus) have been used to treat ailments and maintain health in traditional Chinese medicine since antiquity, according to Dae Hee Lee, a researcher at South Korean medical equipment company CNGBio Co.

In Europe, the use of mushrooms like lion’s mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus) dates back to 450 BCE. Hippocrates (a Greek physician) found that it held potential anti-inflammatory properties and could cauterize wounds. 

But how exactly this fungi acts as medicine is pretty unknown. Recently, a team of researchers from Australia and South Korea have discovered an active compound from the edible lion’s mane mushroom that enhances memory and boosts nerve growth. The study published earlier this year in the Journal of Neurochemistry found that in preclinical trials, the mushrooms improve brain cell growth and memory. CNGBio Co supported and collaborated with the team on this study.

[Related: Oyster mushrooms release nerve gas to kill worms before eviscerating them.]

Previous studies have found that its compounds could be used to help regulate blood sugar and reduce high blood pressure, as well as other mental and brain health applications including treating depression, promoting recovery in brain injuries.

“Extracts from these so-called ‘lion’s mane’ mushrooms have been used in traditional medicine in Asian countries for centuries, but we wanted to scientifically determine their potential effect on brain cells,” said study co-author Frederic Meunier from the Queensland Brain Institute, in a statement. “Pre-clinical testing found the lion’s mane mushroom had a significant impact on the growth of brain cells and improving memory.”

Lion’s mane mushrooms grow on old or dead broadleaf tree trunks. Like many fungi, they’re composed of a visible fruiting body (the mushroom itself) and the mycelium–the bottom structure that looks like roots. Both the fruiting body and mycelium have compounds with potential health benefits.

The team studied how compounds in the mushrooms affected brain cells and found that it promoted the neurons to extend and connect to one another. “Using super-resolution microscopy, we found the mushroom extract and its active components largely increase the size of growth cones, which are particularly important for brain cells to sense their environment and establish new connections with other neurons in the brain,” said Meunier.

[Related: We may finally know how magic mushrooms help fight depression.]

According to the team, a future application of this compound could be protecting against neurodegenerative cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

“Our idea was to identify bioactive compounds from natural sources that could reach the brain and regulate the growth of neurons, resulting in improved memory formation,” said co-author Ramon Martinez-Marmol from the University of Queensland, in a statement.

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The British staple beans on toast is in for a makeover. A group of researchers plan to slip faba beans inside white bread to make it more nutritious and sustainable. The product, which they’ve dubbed “beans in toast,” could hit UK shelves in the next few years if a company decides to manufacture it. 

About 96 percent of the British public eat bread, and of those, 90 percent choose white bread, according to Kantar Group, a data analytics company. Putting faba beans, also commonly called fava beans and broad beans, where the recipe calls for soy could provide Britons with a source of easily digested protein, fiber and iron, which are often low in UK diets. “We’ve chosen faba beans because they’re very particularly nutrient-rich,” says Julie Lovegrove, the leading researcher of the project and a professor of human nutrition at the University of Reading in England. She says that only 11 percent of the UK population consumes the recommended fiber intake of 30 grams a day. 

According to Lovegrove, early testing of the faba bean product resembles normal white bread. “It tastes very similar; it looks very similar,” she says. “It’s slightly darker in color, and doesn’t rise slightly as much as the white bread. But we are at the beginning of this project, so those are the challenges that we’re going to overcome. We want to make it as identical to the commercial white bread as we can.”

The researchers say that faba beans, native to northern Africa and southwestern Asia, can be grown sustainably and at low cost in the UK. “For the UK, the most sustainable plant-based protein source is the one that requires the least input for the maximum output [of protein yield],” Donal O’Sullivan, a crop science professor at the University of Reading and another one of the researchers, wrote in an email to PopSci. “It is faba bean that has the most favorable footprint.” 

[Related: To save water, Arizona farmers are growing guayule for sustainable tires]

White bread is typically made using 1 to 3 percent soya flour, grown from soybeans, which is used to whiten the bread, according to Yael Vodovotz, a food scientist and professor at the Ohio State University. Researchers would replace the soya flour and 25 percent of the wheat with faba bean flour, which they say could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the production process by 11 percent compared to a wheat-only loaf. 

The project is an exercise in sustainable local food growth, which Lovegrove says the UK government has encouraged through funding. Most of the country’s soybeans are imported across oceans, and a sizable portion of the supply comes from the US. In fact, soybeans make up the second largest cash crop in the states behind corn, with farmers sending $27 billion worth of the commodity abroad in 2021. The bean’s prominence has led the crop to become the subject of trade politics, with China, the biggest US soy importer, instituting tit-for-tat tariffs in 2018.

US soybean production has a relatively low carbon footprint and most are grown using just precipitation, according to Jeremy Ross, a soybean agronomist and professor at the University of Arkansas. “Less than 10 percent of the total US acreage of soybean is irrigated. So a majority of the soybean acres in the US are dependent on rainfall during the growing season,” he wrote in an email to PopSci. 

[Related: Which veggie oil is most sustainable?]

But soybeans aren’t native to the UK and don’t grow well there. Faba beans, on the other hand, sprout nicely in the country. “We’re using homegrown pulses,” or dried legumes, Lovegrove says. (Only about 55 percent of food that Britons eat are grown in the country—the rest are imported.) “There’s a big drive to increase the growth of food within the UK to reduce miles traveled of the foods themselves,” she explains.

The group of researchers won £2 million in government funding to develop their beans in toast product. The project is led by a large coalition: 25 researchers from the University of Reading will work with retailers, farmers, and policymakers. There are several steps to get it started. First, the researchers will grow the faba beans and produce the flour for the substitute. Then, they will test their product and survey consumers for their opinions on it. Finally, they will model the impact of increasing dried-legume consumption on human and environmental health.

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For many of us, coffee is an essential. But the research on its role in a healthy diet is still pretty confusing. It wakes most of us up so we’re ready to face the day, can lower the risk of dementia, and may increase longevity. However, too much can lead to headaches, stomach aches, an increased heart rate, and more. 

One key to balancing this out may lie in what goes into the caffeinated beverage: milk. A study published January 30 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, finds that a milk and coffee combo might have an anti-inflammatory effect. 

[Related: Coffee and tea could lower your risk of dementia.]

Inflammation occurs when foreign substances, bacteria, or viruses enter the body and inflammatory cells are released as a defense. It also happens when tendons or muscles are overloaded, like after a workout. Chronic inflammation is a  symptom of diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis, which can cause pain, fever, and damaged joints.

In a new study, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark investigated how antioxidants called polyphenols behave when combined with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. 

Polyphenols are naturally found antioxidants in lots of fruits and vegetables, tea, coffee, red wine and beer, but there are still many unknowns about the substance. 

“In the study, we show that as a polyphenol reacts with an amino acid, its inhibitory effect on inflammation in immune cells is enhanced,” said study co-author Marianne Nissen Lund from the University of Copehahagen’s Department of Food Science, in a statement. “As such, it is clearly imaginable that this cocktail could also have a beneficial effect on inflammation in humans. We will now investigate further, initially in animals. After that, we hope to receive research funding which will allow us to study the effect in humans.”

The team applied artificial inflammation to immune cells to investigate what kind of anti-inflammatory effect occurs when polyphenols and proteins are combined. One group of cells received various doses of polyphenols that had reacted with an amino acid. Another group only received polyphenols in the same doses and a control group didn’t get anything.

They found that the immune cells that were treated with the combination of polyphenols and amino acids were actually twice as effective at fighting inflammation as the cells to which only polyphenols were added.

[Related: Should pregnant people not drink coffee? The answer is complicated.]

“It is interesting to have now observed the anti-inflammatory effect in cell experiments. And obviously, this has only made us more interested in understanding these health effects in greater detail. So, the next step will be to study the effects in animals,” said co-author Andrew Williams of the university’s Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, in a statement.

Previous research has found that polyphenols bind to proteins in beer, meat products, and milk, and beer. In a separate new study Nissen Lund tested whether the molecules also bind to each other in a coffee drink with milk. 

“Our result demonstrates that the reaction between polyphenols and proteins also happens in some of the coffee drinks with milk that we studied. In fact, the reaction happens so quickly that it has been difficult to avoid in any of the foods that we’ve studied so far,” said Nissen Lund.

More work is needed on the major advantages of polyphenols and the team’s next steps include figuring out how to add the right quantities of polyphenols to foods to achieve the best quality.

“Because humans do not absorb that much polyphenol, many researchers are studying how to encapsulate polyphenols in protein structures which improve their absorption in the body,” said Nissen Lund. “This strategy has the added advantage of enhancing the anti-inflammatory effects of polyphenols.”

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Adapted from the book WHAT’S GOTTEN INTO YOU by Dan Levitt. Copyright © 2023 by Dan Levitt. Courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

By the late 1800s, scientists had identified four of the basic substances that make up our bodies: protein, fat, carbohydrates and minerals. These four kinds of molecules form the scientific basis of the ingredient list in the first baby food: Liebig’s Soluble Food for Babies, “the most perfect substitute for mother’s milk.” Unfortunately, no one suspected that Liebig’s list was incomplete, which would explain why babies raised solely on his formula did not thrive. It turns out that we have to eat one more type of molecule to assemble ourselves.

   Unhappily, a lack of this last kind of substance was responsible for four exceptionally gruesome diseases. In the seafaring age between 1500 and 1800, scurvy killed about two million sailors, many more than the who died in battle. Throughout Asia, a pernicious disease called beriberi sporadically paralyzed and killed millions. Pellagra, memorably known for its four “D”s—dementia, dermatitis, diarrhea, and death—afflicted the poor in Europe and America, particularly many in the American South who primarily ate bacon, cornbread, and molasses. Rickets deformed the bones of the children of rich and poor alike. Growing up in Arkansas during the Great Depression, my own mother-in-law’s sisters were stricken by it. Until scientists could discover the reason for these inexplicable ailments, countless victims would suffer and die hideous deaths.

Some clues, however, had long been visible, including a particularly promising one that appeared half a century before Liebig was even born. In 1747, a 31-year-old British naval surgeon named James Lind stood one day on the rolling deck of the HMS Salisbury, a three-masted ship of war outfitted with fifty cannon. As they patrolled the Bay of Biscay, off the coast of France, Lind relished the fresh air, a welcome relief from the stagnant hold below and the vexing mystery he faced there.

It had been only eight weeks since they’d left port, and already forty of the three hundred sailors on board had contracted scurvy. The men limping to Lind’s sick bay had putrid gums and red, blue, or black spots resembling bruises on their skin. They were lethargic and losing the strength to walk. He knew that, if the disease grew too advanced, he would have to cut away their grossly swollen gums just so that they could swallow their food.

In the British navy, this was hardly unusual. Scurvy was common on longer voyages. Lind was all too aware of the single worst incident, as it had happened just seven years earlier. The navy had dispatched a squadron of eight ships under the command of Sir George Anson to attack Spanish galleons in South America. Three and a half years later, Anson returned with a treasure so vast, he needed thirty-two wagons to haul it to the Tower of London. But only about 400 of his 1,900 men returned with him. Most had died of scurvy.

It was not that the navy completely ignored the disease. The problem was, there was no agreement on how to cure it.

Yet, this knowledge had once been known, at least by some. Two hundred years before, many ship captains could have told you that scurvy breaks out on long voyages that deprive sailors of fresh fruit and vegetables. The writer Stephen Bown observes that in the seventeenth century, captains made mad dashes from port to port in an attempt to outrun the disease. It was also known that lemon juice could prevent or cure it. In his 1617 textbook, The Surgeon’s Mate, John Woodall recommended lemon juice daily. The Dutch East India Company even established plantations in the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius to provide lemons for their crews.

Over time, unfortunately, the knowledge of lemon juice’s beneficial properties somehow vanished. The reasons were many, including simple complacency. When the incidence of scurvy grew worse again, there was resistance to citrus. Lemon juice was expensive and some shipowners suspected that merchants touted the imaginary medicinal powers of lemons just to drive up the price. At the same time, physicians were peddling a confusing variety of many other supposed cures. As author David Harvie observes, there were even “anti-fruiters,” who claimed that lemons hurt rather than helped sailors on some expeditions.

Lind had seen relatively little scurvy himself until, on their tenweek voyage the previous summer, eighty of his crew had been laid low. As he cast about for an explanation, he noted that the rainy cold weather they encountered had made it hard for the crew to dry out and fostered stale air in the hold. Lind wondered if this bad air was the culprit. He also contemplated the possibility that the lack of a proper diet was to blame. Yet that seemed unlikely. “They had been afflicted by scurvy,” he would write, “even though the captain supplied the crew with mutton-broth fowls and meat from his own table.” On Lord Anson’s ships, Lind noted, scurvy had broken out in spite of a plentiful supply of what he believed to be adequate provisions and good water.

Despite Anson’s staggering loss, the brass in the British Admiralty displayed a disastrous lack of urgency. There was a great difference of opinion about its cause. Was it overcrowding? An excess of salt? Bad air? Some believed that only sluggish and lazy sailors succumbed to it. Moreover, even if they were to accept that for some strange reason lemons helped prevent it, carrying large crates of lemons on long voyages would entail great expense and was impractical besides, because lemons and lemon juice spoil. Perhaps most important, scurvy usually passed over the officers and higher-ranking seamen. So it simply seemed more expedient to replace casualties by pressing more unwitting men into service (often through trickery or kidnapping) than it was to shoulder the burden and expense of trying to prevent the disease.

Lind, newly promoted to ship’s surgeon, was horrified by scurvy. Having a sound scientific mind, he requested permission from his captain to search for a remedy by conducting an experiment that is considered by some to be the first clinical trial in all of medicine. Lind divided twelve sailors suffering from scurvy into six pairs and lodged them in hammocks in the ship’s forehold. He doled out a different remedy to each: either cider, sulfuric acid, vinegar, seawater, or oranges and lemons. The unfortunate sixth pair received a formulation that one of Lind’s colleagues recommended: an unappetizing paste of garlic, mustard seed, dried radish root, a tree resin known as balsam of Peru, gum myrrh, and for good measure, an occasional dose of barley water with tamarind along with cream of tartar to purge the system. After a week, he ran out of fruit and had to end his trial. It was by now evident that only two of the remedies had any effect. The cider appeared to help a little bit, while, incredible as it seemed, the citrus largely cured the disease—so much so that one sailor returned to duty, and Lind put the other to work nursing his companions.

You might think that Lind would immediately jump up and down yelling “Eureka,” because he had just proven, for all time, that something in citrus fruit cured scurvy. Not a chance. The unfortunate Lind was mired up to his hips in intellectual quicksand—the confusing medical theories of his day.

Lind gave himself time to make sense of his work. He retired from the navy, earned a medical degree in Edinburgh, and established a practice as a physician. Then he settled down to review many accounts of scurvy by others, before finally and conclusively explaining it.

In 1753, six years after his landmark experiment, Lind published a 456-page opus. Although the results of his experiment may seem clear-cut, his conclusions could have been, well, more conclusive. This is the point in our story where one wants to say, “Wait, wait! Can’t you see?” After perceptively reviewing fifty-four other works on scurvy, he only gets around to his own trial a third of the way through the book—and devotes just five paragraphs to it. He was confident he had shown that citrus could cure scurvy, yet he struggled to explain the malady’s cause. Concepts of disease at the time were a complete mess.

They were dominated by Galen’s idea that sickness resulted from an imbalance of bodily humors. So Lind concluded that on ships, a combination of poor diet and moist cold air blocked perspiration, and this trapped putrid unwholesome humors inside the body. He explained that citrus could open up the skin’s pores, but in a later edition he conceded that other medicines could also do the same. “I do not mean to say,” he opined, “that lemon juice and wine are the only remedy for the scurvy. This disease, like many others, may be cured by Medicines of very different and opposite qualities to each other, and to that of lemons.” As the author Frances Frankenburg observed, “If there was ever a researcher who doubted his own findings, it was James Lind.”

On the bright side, Lind did recommend that sailors use lemon juice to prevent the disease. But he followed that sound suggestion with an uncharacteristically sloppy error. To prevent the juice from rotting, he suggested it should be heated to make a syrup—little suspecting that heat destroys the juice’s curative powers. To add to the confusion, many distinguished physicians championed other cures that were entirely ineffective. One sea surgeon wrote sourly, “Dr. Lind reckons the want of fresh vegetables and greens a very powerful cause of the Scurvy; he might with equal reason, have added fresh animal food, wine, punch, spruce beer, or whatever else is capable of preventing this disease.” Lind’s critic went on to recommend rice as a remedy, or a mixture of one-fourth brandy and three-fourths water. Scurvy rampaged on, unabated.

In 1756, three years after Lind published his treatise, the Seven Years’ War broke out between Britain and France. Of the 184,899 sailors who enlisted or were pressed into the Royal Navy, only 1,512 were killed in action. Another 133,708 expired from disease—primarily scurvy. Scurvy continued to hamstring the British navy during the American Revolution that followed soon after. If the Admiralty had provided lemons to their crews, some argue, the British might have prevailed against the colonies, or at least held off France’s navy and negotiated a more favorable settlement.

It wasn’t until 1795, a year after Lind’s death, that the Royal Navy began issuing lemon juice to sailors. For a time, scurvy actually ceased to be a problem. But after taking one fruitful step forward, the navy leaped two steps back. Eighty years later, they switched to limes, which they could buy more cheaply from plantations in the British West Indies. Henceforth, British sailors were, of course, known as limeys. But regrettably, limes were much less effective at preventing scurvy, and this cast doubt on the value of any citrus juice as a cure. Even in the early twentieth century, when doctors agreed that fresh fruit and vegetables could treat scurvy, they still could not agree on the disease’s cause, which is why, in 1912, scurvy plagued the British explorer Robert Scott’s meticulously planned expedition to the South Pole. His conviction that bacterial food poisoning was to blame likely hastened his own demise. After hundreds of years, scurvy’s cause still remained a mystery.

Buy What’s Gotten Into You by Dan Levitt here.

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While eating locally grown produce is great for the environment, eating locally caught freshwater fish might be more dangerous for human health than we realized. A study from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) finds that freshwater fish in the United States contain dangerous levels of “forever chemicals” including one called PFOS (Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid). PFOS is part of a group of manufactured additives known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

“PFAS are called forever chemicals because they do not break down in the environment and often bioaccumulate in people and species, like fish,” said David Andrews, a senior scientist at EWG senior scientist and one of the study’s lead authors, in an email to PopSci. “PFOS was the primary ingredient in 3M’s ScotchGard. It was also used in other products, like aqueous film forming foam used for fighting fires. PFOS is one of thousands of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances.”

PFOS is just one of the PFAS that have since seeped into drinking water and accumulated in the bodies of fish, livestock, dairy, and game animals. The team in this study found that eating one fish in a year is equal to drinking water with PFOS at 48 parts per trillion (ppt) for one month.

[Related: 3M announces it will cease making ‘forever chemical’ PFAS by 2026.]

“People who consume freshwater fish, especially those who catch and eat fish regularly, are at risk of alarming levels of PFAS in their bodies,” Andrews said in a statement. “Growing up, I went fishing every week and ate those fish. But now when I see fish, all I think about is PFAS contamination.”

According to the team, the research bolsters calls for stronger regulations of these chemicals, more testing on fish, and raises environmental justice concerns for the communities who depend on eating freshwater fish, including local Native American tribes.

The study found that the median amounts of PFAS in freshwater fish were 280 times greater than the forever chemicals detected in some commercially caught and sold fish. Eating a single meal of freshwater fish could lead to similar PFAS exposure as eating store-bought fish every day for a year, according to testing data.

“These test results are breathtaking,” said Scott Faber, EWG’s senior vice president for government affairs, in a statement. “Eating one bass is equivalent to drinking PFOS-tainted water for a month.”

The team analyzed data from more than 500 samples of fish fillets collected from 2013 to 2015 under monitoring programs by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Rivers and Streams Assessment, and the Great Lakes Human Health Fish Fillet Tissue Study.

“PFAS contaminated fish across the U.S., with higher levels in the Great Lakes and fish caught in urban areas,” said Tasha Stoiber, an EWG senior scientist and study co-author, in a statement. “PFAS do not disappear when products are thrown or flushed away. Our research shows that the most common disposal methods may end up leading to further environmental pollution.”

PFOS-contaminated fish can raise blood serum levels of PFOS in people and even infrequent consumption of freshwater fish can raise PFOS levels in the body. A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that the chemicals in the PFAS family are linked to cancer, high cholesterol, various chronic diseases, and a limited antibody response to vaccines in children and adults.

[Related: Certain PFAS were destroyed with a common soap ingredient in lab tests.]

“The extent that PFAS has contaminated fish is staggering”, said Nadia Barbo, a graduate student at Duke University and lead researcher on this project, in a statement. “There should be a single health protective fish consumption advisory for freshwater fish across the country.”

In the early 2000s, manufacturers agreed to voluntarily stop using long-chain PFAS in the US, but they can still be found in some imported items. The FDA phased out the use of PFOS in food packaging in 2016. Still, there could be more than 40,000 industrial polluters of PFAS in the US, according to EWG estimates.

“For decades, polluters have dumped as much PFAS as they wanted into our rivers, streams, lakes and bays with impunity. We must turn off the tap of PFAS pollution from industrial discharges, which affect more and more Americans every day,” added Faber.

Along with perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), PFOS is a “long-chain” PFAS, made from an 8-carbon chain. According to the CDC, over 9,000 different PFAS exist and the chemicals have been reworked to be 4- and 6-carbon chains. Some experts say that these newer versions could have many of the same dangerous health effects as the 8-chain PFAS, continuing the risk to consumers and the environment.

Avoiding PFAS is nearly impossible, with the chemicals in everything from cookware to clothing to carpeting. They were found in 52 percent of tested cosmetics in a 2021 study. The coating used on nonstick pans (polytetrafluoroethylene) has been found to be the most common additive.

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The new year may already be here, but it can be hard to imagine reinventing yourself when you’re still coming out of a ham- and egg-nog-induced lethargy. After weeks of inundating our bodies with treats and drinks, nothing is more enticing that the hope of a quick fix, the promise that you’ll be back to your best with a little activated charcoal, green juice, herbal tea, or apple cider vinegar. All you need, the internet says, is to quickly detox your body.

The detox industry is on the rise—and the profits are rolling in. But cleansing our bodies of impurities is anything but a new idea. Ayurvedic medicine, one of the oldest forms of traditional medicine, has employed a five-part detoxification method—including medicated enemas and drug-induced vomiting—since the 2nd century BCE. But here in modern times, we have a much better understanding of our supposed detox needs.

“If your body already has a working liver, working kidneys and working lungs, your body already has the balance it needs,” says Katherine Zeratsky, a registered dietician at the Mayo Clinic. Alluring detox tools really aren’t necessary. More to the point, there’s really no evidence that detoxes flush toxins from your body in the first place.

[Related: The truth about oil pulling, apple cider vinegar, and other trendy cleanses]

While arguably ineffective, most detox methods are not directly harmful. But they do come with their risks. Consuming nothing but green juice for a few days is an unbalanced approach, but it probably won’t hurt your body, Zeratsky says. However, every case is different. Last year, due to a history of gastric bypass and recent antibiotic exposure, a woman developed a severe kidney condition after starting a green juice diet. So, if you do decide you still want to jump on the detox bandwagon, definitely check with your doctor first. And don’t expect to feel better soon. Days spent fasting or running to the bathroom will likely make you feel fatigued and uncomfortable.

There’s also evidence that detoxing might not serve your mental health. In one Hungarian study, researchers interviewed people staying in juice cleanse camps, a sort of health retreat. They found that detoxing was the number one reason cited for the juice cleanse, which was commonly paired with laxatives. Participants’ reasons for detoxing commonly overlapped with indicators of purging disorder and orthorexia nervosa, an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. The risks to long-term mental health may therefore be worse than any immediate physiological risks.

Most of the time, when people say they are looking to detox, what Zeratsky actually hears is “that they want to hit the reset button,” she says. “You can do that with good nutrition.” Cleanses and charcoal aren’t really worth the investment.

So if you do want to ditch the drowsiness and rejuvenate, you don’t need to buy teas and tinctures. Use these simple tips instead to keep your body’s natural detox system in optimal shape.

Without adequate sleep your brain is slower to process information. Even one less hour of recommended sleep per night can throw off your metabolism and increase your risk of pre-diabetes. Insufficient rest overall has been linked to diseases like obesity and hypertension, and seems to damage your immune system and lower your life expectancy. Nothing seems to go untouched when you skip out on the shut-eye.

2. Drink plenty of water

Water is critical for more than feeling hydrated. It keeps your bodily fluids flowing so that the lungs, kidneys, and liver can do their jobs. All bodily processes release some kind of waste, and having enough water is critical to keep blood vessels open and those byproducts flowing to the liver and kidneys where they can be filtered out. (In the kidneys, you need enough water so that extra ions, sugars, and waste products can diffuse from the blood into the kidney and eventually leave your body as urine.) But when you’re not sufficiently hydrated, your kidneys try to conserve water by concentrating your urine. In the short run, the higher concentration of waste products in your urine means you lose less water; but in the long term, it increases your risk of kidney stones and urinary tract infection.

[Related: Hydration seems to be the key to aging better and living longer]

Ironically, some detox methods—like colon cleansing, which can cause cramping, vomiting, and diarrhea—can actually work against your efforts to stay hydrated. Getting rid of fluids via excessive urination or defecation just makes it harder for your liver and kidneys to function.

So grab your pillow and a water bottle, and make your first purchase of the year something more fun—and effective—than a detox.

3. Find an exercise routine

There’s not much evidence that sweating actually helps detox body toxins. But what it does do, when combined with exercise, is keep your liver in good shape so that the organ can cover your body’s janitorial duties. A mix of cardio, weight lifting, and general regular movement could reduce fat stores and a risk of liver disease. Even if it means taking a short yoga break during work, versus carving out time for a whole hot yoga class, your body will be stronger for it.

Is your head constantly spinning with outlandish, mind-burning questions? If you’ve ever wondered what the universe is made of, what would happen if you fell into a black hole, or even why not everyone can touch their toes, then you should be sure to listen and subscribe to Ask Us Anything, a podcast from the editors of Popular Science. Ask Us Anything hits Apple, Anchor, Spotify, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Tuesday and Thursday. Each episode takes a deep dive into a single query we know you’ll want to stick around for.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on January 1, 2020.

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It’s not a secret that diets high in sodium come with huge health risks, including high blood pressure, increased risk of stroke, heart disease, stomach cancer, and chronic kidney disease. The American Heart Association estimates that processed, packaged, and restaurant meals make up 75 percent of daily sodium intake in the United States.

In an effort to combat this, World Health Organization (WHO) recommends reducing the population-wide average sodium intake by 30 percent by 2025 in order to combat negative health outcomes. This limits total daily sodium intake to about per person to about 2,000 milligrams a day per person, compared to the estimated 3,400 mg of sodium consumed by the average American every day. The WHO also released guidance for sodium levels in food categories that are the biggest contributors to sodium intake such as processed meats, bread, and sauces in 2021.

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

Now, a study published January 10 in the journal Hypertension offers even more evidence of the positive health outcomes that sodium reduction could have. The paper details a voluntary effort by the Australian government to reformulate 27 packaged food categories across the continent. It found that removing some of the sodium from packaged foods could save about 1,700 lives per year and prevent nearly 7,000 annual diagnoses of heart disease, kidney disease, and stomach cancer in Australia.

“We had previously modeled the potential impact of the Australian program,” said the study’s co-lead author Kathy Trieu, lead author of the study and a research fellow in food policy at The George Institute for Global Health, and a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, in a statement. “In this study, we wanted to estimate the potential number of additional premature deaths, new cases of disease and years lived with disability that may be averted with the WHO sodium benchmarks, which are above and beyond the Australian government’s sodium reformulation targets.”

[Related: What happens if you eat too much salt?]

The team applied the same statistical model used in their previous study to estimate the potential impact of extending the Australian plan to include all of the 58 packaged food categories in the WHO’s benchmarks. They used national data from 2011 to 2012 on the amount of sodium in the food, how much was eaten nationwide, and sales data. Next, the team used published statistics about the relationship between sodium intake and high blood pressure, to calculate the potential effects of sodium reduction on rates of cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease. High blood pressure is a major risk factor for both conditions.

“Our findings indicate that compliance with WHO benchmarks compared with Australia’s current sodium targets may result in substantial health gains and prevent more than three times as many deaths and new cases of disease each year,” said Trieu. Trieu added that including more packaged food products and stricter sodium targets may have had a greater impact.

The team says that some of the limitations of this study include needing more recent data and that estimates of disease burden may be less accurate than estimates of more easily measured outcomes such as death.

According to the CDC, some ways to reduce sodium intake include buying fresh, frozen, or canned vegetables with no salt or sauce added, comparing the amount of sodium in different products by reading Nutrition Facts labels, and limiting sauces, mixes, and instant product.

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When you first start working out consistently, it’s not unusual to go through a period of noticeable changes followed by a sudden plateau where progress seems to slam to a halt. It’s very common, but if you want to get over that frustrating phase, taking note of your calorie and nutritional intake can help.

When I hit my plateau, I spent a week monitoring what I ate and discovered that, regardless of how healthy my diet was, I was eating enough to sustain two men. Tracking provided the data I needed to make better decisions, which allowed me to enjoy steady progress.

Whether your fitness goal is fat loss or muscle gain, nutrition tracking is easy, and you can count on several tools to make the best of your journey. 

How the body burns fat and gains muscle

You require a specific number of calories to function and if you hit it every day, your body will remain exactly the same in terms of muscle and fat. This number is known as your maintenance caloric intake, and it depends on parameters like your height, weight, genetics, and daily activity levels. Adult men will typically fall somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 calories, says the US Department of Agriculture, while women commonly require between 1,600 and 2,400.

[Related: There are only two supplements proven to help you build muscle]

Keep in mind that no matter the app or method you use, the numbers you see in these tools are only approximations. The formulas these platforms use to calculate numbers like your maintenance rate, for example, are based on general statistics that leave little room for individuality, and may not consider factors that make your body different from the norm. This also applies to the apps’ massive database of food data, as the caloric value you see on labels and packaging can be up to 20 percent inaccurate, says the US Food and Drug Administration, so be careful not to get too attached to the exact number. 

And then there’s the body’s ability to absorb only a fraction of the available calories, which may be anything between 20 and 90 percent, says Michael S. Parker, a certified fitness nutrition specialist and founder of Forge Fitness. This is because our bodies just don’t digest the calories of some foods as well as others.

Instead of trying to make these numbers fit perfectly, Parker recommends using calorie tracking as a rough set of guidelines to help you learn about the energy value in various foods and how much you’re actually eating. From there you can stop tracking and make wise eating decisions when you’re hungry. 

How much of each macro you should eat depends on factors like your basal metabolic rate, sex, age, and weight. But for muscle building, the International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends consuming 1.4 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. They also recommend 4 to 7 grams per kilo per day of carbs for weight training athletes to optimize strength performance and muscle building. You should devote the rest of your daily calorie budget to dietary fat. Nutrition tracking apps can monitor your macros and do all the math for you, so you can tackle multiple goals at the same time. For example, you’ll be able to prioritize protein to maintain muscle mass while leaving enough of a deficit in your calorie budget to enable fat burning. 

Health and safety are more important than any fitness goal

You should never use overuse caloric deficit in an attempt to lose weight faster. Losing fat—and keeping it off—is safest and most effective when you do it gradually. A deficit of around 500 calories a day will burn fat at a rate of up to one pound per week, which research shows is a safe and sustainable pace.

But counting calories is a slippery slope and people who hyper-fixate on recording everything they eat run the risk of developing eating disorders.

“Tracking nutrition can easily turn into something that is unhealthy,” says Katherine Metzelaar, a registered dietitian and founder of Bravespace Nutrition, an organization that helps patients recover from eating disorders and challenges relating to body image. “I would not recommend someone track [their food] if they have a history of dieting, disordered eating, or an eating disorder.” 

She explains that having food tracking take up a lot of headspace is a clear warning sign, especially if that prevents you from going to restaurants or eating at your friends or family’s house. Other red flags include feelings of anxiety when you can’t track your food, guilt around what you’ve eaten, restricting food because you’ve met your calorie budget, and not being able to be spontaneous with meals.

[Related: Anorexia may be more complicated than we thought]

Keep in mind that in your fitness journey, you’re not going to see changes overnight. Building muscle and losing fat is the result of introducing healthy eating and exercise habits into your lifestyle on a sustainable basis. Tracking your nutrition is definitely not a silver bullet solution, but it can help set you on the path to that sustainability.

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It’s that time of year again, when millions make a New Year’s resolution to eat healthier. This decision can feel daunting, especially when you consider all of the popular diets that trend on social media. However, there is one that might be best to avoid—the raw-food diet.

That diet was the lowest-ranked of 24 food plans evaluated by a panel of 30 experts in US News & World Report’s annual diet ranking for 2023. The experts looked at multiple factors to make their decision, including how easy it is to follow a diet, the potential for disease prevention when on a plan, and the presence of all food groups. Each diet was given a score best on 11 sets of rankings, including best overall, best diabetes diet, best heart healthy diet, and best plant based diet. New to the 2023 list are the best family-friendly diets, ranked partially based on adaptability, and the best diets for joint and bone health.

[Related: An archeologist’s quest to find seafood’s place on the ancient Mediterranean menu.]

The raw-food diet scored the worst. True to its name, this diet calls for only eating foods that haven’t been cooked. This includes fruits, vegetables, beans, sprouted grains, and sometimes animal products such as raw fish or unprocessed dairy.

“The safest and healthiest way to enjoy raw foods is as part of a whole foods, plant-based diet that is rich in raw fruits and vegetables, and cooked lentils, beans, grains and vegetables,” says Vanita Rahman, an internal medicine physician and clinic director of the Barnard Medical Center in Washington, D.C., in the report.

There is no evidence that cutting out cooked foods offers health benefits, according to the report, and eating only raw-food is extremely limiting. This diet may also make users more hungry, since raw foods are often lower in protein and calories than prepared food. This makes the diet more difficult to maintain over time, even though there may be the temporary weight loss. Sticking to an easy-to-maintain diet over a longer period of time, studies have found, are usually the best strategies are at any age.

Other diets toward the bottom of the list include those that are too strict or too difficult for users to follow in the long term, or they cut out food groups that could potentially be nutritious. These include the low-carb Atkins and Keto diets, and SlimFast and Optavia, both of which use processed shakes, bars, and supplements to replace whole foods.

[Related: Do you need a daily multivitamin? Probably not, says national health task force.]

Coming out on top for the sixth year in a row is the Mediterranean diet. This diet includes primarily plant-based foods, such as fruits and vegetables, in addition to bean, nuts, whole grains, seafood, lean poultry and unsaturated fat from extra-virgin olive oil. The diet is effective and simple, the report says, and studies have shown that it reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes while promoting higher quality of life and longer lifespans.

“What’s nice is Mediterranean is relatively user friendly. How it’s structured is similar to the (U.S. Department of Agriculture) healthy eating plan,” Camila Martin, a nutritionist at University of Wisconsin Health in Madison, who wasn’t involved in the rankings, tells TODAY.com. “It’s very modifiable based off what people have access to even with limited resources.”

Other diets that that perform well, according to the report, are dietary approaches to stop hypertension (DASH), Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC), and flexitarian, which features primarily plant-based foods with occasional meat. All three are intuitive, accessible, and encourage regular exercise.

But before you shake up what you eat, consult an expert: It is important to discuss any potential diet changes with a trusted healthcare provider.

The post Experts rank the raw food diet as the worst of 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Drinking more water and staying hydrated is a good way to achieve that New Year’s resolution of living a more healthy lifestyle. According to the Cleveland Clinic, water is essential for multiple functions in your body, including digestion, creating hormones and neurotransmitters, and delivering oxygen, and up to 60 percent of the adult human body is made of water. 

It can also help with healthy aging, according to a study published Monday in the journal eBioMedicine. The research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that well-hydrated adults appear to develop fewer chronic health conditions (heart diseases, lung disease, etc.), have a decreased risk of dying early, and are generally more healthy. 

[Related: The truth about hydration hacks like IV therapies, alkaline water, and more.]

The study looked at health data gathered from 11,255 adults over 30 years and looked at links between serum sodium levels and other indicators of health. Typically, serum sodium levels increase when fluid intake decreases.

The researchers assessed information shared during five medical visits for each participant—the first two when patients were in their 50s and the last when they were between 70 and 90 years-old. Adults who had high levels of serum sodium at their baseline check-in or those who had underlying conditions that can affect serum sodium levels, such as obesity, were excluded to allow for a better comparison of how hydration is correlated with health outcomes.

Then, the team evaluated how serum sodium levels correlated with biological aging, using 15 health markers, including systolic blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol.  The study also adjusted for demographic and health factors, including age, race, biological sex, smoking status, and hypertension. 

The results found that adults on the higher end of normal level of serum sodium had a 10 to 15 percent greater chance of being biologically older than their chronological age, when compared with participants in the mid-normal range. Additionally, participants at greater risk of aging more quickly also had a 64 percent higher risk for developing chronic diseases such as stroke, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, chronic lung disease, peripheral artery disease, dementia, and diabetes.

The study did not have information on how much water participants drank and does not prove a causal effect, according to the researchers.

“The results suggest that proper hydration may slow down aging and prolong a disease-free life,” said Natalia Dmitrieva, a study author and researcher at the NIH’s Laboratory of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), in a statement.

This new study expands on research this team of scientists published in March 2022, which linked higher ranges of normal serum sodium with an increased risk of heart failure. Both studies also used data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. 

“This study adds observational evidence that reinforces the potential long-term benefits of improved hydration on reductions in long-term health outcomes, including mortality,” Howard Sesso, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and associate epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who was not involved in the study, told CNN. He added, “it would have been nice to combine their definition of hydration, based on serum sodium levels only, with actual fluid intake data from the ARIC cohort.”

[Related: This device will allow the marines to make drinking water from thin air.]

The National Academies of Medicine suggests that most women consume around 6 to 9 cups of fluids per day and men drink 8 to 12 cups.  Some ways to add more fluids beyond drinking water include drinking juice or eating fruits and vegetables with higher water content, according to the researchers.
“On the global level, this can have a big impact,” said Dmitrieva. “Decreased body water content is the most common factor that increases serum sodium, which is why the results suggest that staying well hydrated may slow down the aging process and prevent or delay chronic disease.” 

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‘Tis the season for cookies. A poll from YouGovAmerica finds that chocolate chips are the favorite Christmas cookie, with 78 percent of those polled picking these gooey goodness as number one, followed by sugar cookies with 64 percent, and fudge cookies at 63 percent. 

While sugar cookies, gingerbread, and chocolate chips get most of the hype as the year draws to a close, a tiny “super grain” might have the potential to  make a super cookie.

[Related: The quinoa genome could help scientists get it out of the health food aisle.]

In a recent study published in the Journal of Food Science researchers from Washington State University (WSU) show how two types of quinoa that are bred to specifically grow in Washington state can be a high-fiber, high-protein additive to the flour used to bake cookies. The study finds that when baked the cookies had what bakers call “spreadability” and texture.

“It’s the Holy Grail for food scientists: we want to develop something that people love to eat and want to go buy and buy again—and now we’re adding some fiber in without them even knowing it,” said Girish Ganjyal, a WSU food scientist and the study’s corresponding author, in a statement.

Popular with health food enthusiasts, quinoa has slowly increased in popularity and the global quinoa industry is expected to reach almost $91 billion this year. The grain originated in South America and it has a ton of nutritional benefits. It’s high in protein, fiber, vitamins like B1 and B2, and minerals like zinc and phosphorus. 

WSU plant breeder and study co-author Kevin Murphy estimates that quinoa is currently grown on more than 5,000 acres in the Pacific Northwest, however no official counts are currently available.

Murphy has been breeding quinoa lines specifically to grow well in the Pacific Northwest climate while maintaining, and even enhancing, the crop’s nutritional benefits. The new study also identifies one type of quinoa that works well for “pre-cooked grain salad” (a more familiar use for quinoa) and picking varieties that work well in baking cookies.

[Related: The best substitutions for milk, eggs, and other baking essentials.]

The team looked at 10 different quinoa breeding lines and tested them as a cookie flour made up of 25 to 100 percent quinoa. While many of the breeding lines held up at lower quinoa levels, the cookies crumbled more as they got closer to 100 percent quinoa flour. 

These official taste tests are still underway, but the early results show that using up to 25 percent quinoa flour tended to have better results. People also preferred sugar cookies with 10 percent of the quinoa flour over those that use a traditional all-wheat flour.

According to study first author Elizabeth Nalbandian, a WSU Ph.D. student, the team purposely chose sugar cookies for the taste test since chocolate chip cookies might mask any flavor from the quinoa. 

“I think at 10 percent, quinoa added a type of nutty flavor that people really liked,” Nalbandian said, in a statement. Nalbandian noted that the testers liked the quinoa cookies even more than the control whole flour cookie.

The team plans to continue developing and testing new quinoa food products, noting that the team has a great combination of culinary arts and science. “This is a chef’s art as well as a science,” Ganjyal said.

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Chestnuts roasting on an open fire and the smell of cookies wafting through the air can only mean one thing—the holidays are here. For many, this is a time to see family and get some much needed R&R. But for people with diabetes, the food-filled celebrations can be a bittersweet reminder of what you can and can’t eat.

Having Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the goodies, however. Popular Science spoke with diabetes experts who agree that you can treat yourself this season—as long as you do it in moderation. “It’s okay to indulge on the holidays. They’re special,” says Carolyn Maxwell, an endocrinologist at Stony Brook Medicine in New York.

[Related: FDA approves first drug that can delay onset of Type I diabetes]

Read on for the diabetes do’s and don’ts of navigating merry feasts and festivities. 

Do plan ahead

If you’re going over to a friend’s or family’s holiday dinner, there are several ways to prepare. For example, you can snack throughout the day so you’re not starving when it comes time for the big meal: Having something in your system makes you less likely to binge eat unhealthy foods, says Melissa Gaynor, a dietitian at the Pediatric Diabetes Center at NYU Langone’s Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital. You’ll also want to avoid an excess amount of carbohydrates in your main course. Holiday dinners often have turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes in their lineups—all of which are high in glucose-producing molecules. Gaynor says that eating a large amount of these savory dishes at one time can make it tricky to control blood sugar levels, even if you’re regularly taking insulin. 

While a few carb-loaded bites won’t severely harm your health, says Gaynor, you might want to ask the host for the recipes in advance so you can keep track of what you’re eating. “There are so many websites and apps where you can type in the ingredients of a recipe and it will tell you the nutritional content and the carbs so you don’t have to guess,” she adds. Foods with a low glycemic index—a measure of how quickly they affect your blood glucose levels—are typically healthy for diabetes.

If you want more options at a communal meal, Gaynor recommends making your own dish. Not only would you have something you can definitely eat, but you’ll also know the nutritional contents without extra research. Consider bringing a veggie platter or a side such as roasted cauliflower to the party. 

Don’t drink sugary cocktails

For those who want to fully get into the holiday spirit, having two or three glasses of alcohol at a party is not too bad for your diabetes, says Maxwell. Imbibing too much, however, can lower your inhibitions and make you more likely to indulge in food.

[Related: The best non-alcoholic drinks to sip soberly this holiday]

If you do decide to stir up a drink, skip the cocktails: They’re chock-full of liquid carbs from added juice and syrup, which can spike your blood sugar. Instead, Gaynor recommends making a mixed drink using diet or zero-calorie soda, ginger ale, or seltzer. Be sure to stay hydrated in between drinks—water and other unsweetened beverages can dilute the amount of sugar circulating in your bloodstream, keeping your glucose levels in a healthy range. 

Do eat protein and fiber-rich foods

While both experts say it’s okay to have some carbs, you’ll want most of your plate made up of protein, vegetables, and high-fiber foods that “are going to have less of an effect on blood sugar,” explains Gaynor.

Fibrous fare like artichoke hearts and beans will satisfy your hunger faster, and slow down any spikes in blood sugar because the body can’t break the plant-based nutrients down. Proteins are also super filling and have a minimal effect on raising blood sugar. You can find tasty protein-rich foods in the cheeses of a charcuterie board, olives, and deviled eggs, to name a few. 

Don’t go overboard with dessert

When it comes to sweet treats, it’s all about portion control. If you’re going to gift yourself a small slice of cake, Maxwell recommends pairing it with fresh fruit. “There is sugar in fruit, but it’s almost always going to be better for you than everything else on the dessert table,” she notes.

[Related: How to avoid added sugars]

For heavy dishes like pie, it’s tricky to know how many carbs you’ll end up consuming. Gaynor says this is when it’s important to talk to the host about nutritional details. Even if you cut yourself a piece, be mindful of the serving size, she adds. And remember, you can bring your own dessert, too. Opt for something made with ingredients that have a low glycemic index, like almond or whole grain flour. “You’ll know exactly what ingredients went into that dish,” Gaynor says, “and you can pre-slice it so the portions are set.”

Do take a walk after dinner

Both experts recommend getting some light exercise after a meal at the end of the day. Not only would it help with digesting a big feast, but being active helps with lowering glucose spikes. That doesn’t mean you have to leave the party to hit up the gym: Research shows just a two- to five-minute walk around the block can make a noticeable difference in your blood sugar levels.

The post A diabetes-friendly guide to holiday parties appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

On the eastern end of the Greek island of Crete, archaeologist Dimitra Mylona steps out onto the dun-colored remains of the 3,500-year-old Minoan settlement of Palaikastro and considers the past. Not just the big-P past that is the fundament of her career but also the small-p past of her own route to truth through a discipline burdened by myth and speculation. For the past 30 years, Mylona has been testing and refining her methodology, sifting through sites to ever-finer degrees. And if there’s anything the past few decades have taught her, it’s that the closer you look at ancient Mediterranean civilizations, the more the fish rise to the surface.

Mylona is a zooarchaeologist—a specialist in the study of animal remains of ancient societies. Through the close observation of bones, shells, and other finds, zooarchaeologists try to re-create a picture of the way humans hunted, husbanded, ate, and more generally interacted with the animals around them. Traditionally, zooarchaeologists in the Mediterranean have focused on goat and sheep and other forms of terrestrial protein as the go-to meat sources for Greece and other Mediterranean countries. Back in 1991, as a new graduate student, Mylona thought no differently, imagining herself picking through the remains of livestock. But during one of her first digs, in the same Palaikastro she now surveys, the presence of an entirely different find captivated her—fish bones.

Working by the sea, Mylona and other students were excavating the dirt floors of Minoan houses more than 3,000 years old. To retrieve minuscule finds—carbonized seeds of plants, bits of wood charcoal, bones of birds, lizards, and fish—they sifted the soil by using water to float the smallest of objects to visibility. “One of the senior archaeologists called me over to look into the microscope,” she says. “I imagine she was hoping to find someone that would take an interest in something others had ignored.” In the scope was one of the many tiny fish bones that were found that day, probably belonging to a small comber or a wrasse. The senior archaeologist was right. Mylona gazed at the folds and crenulations of those fish vertebrae and mused: a story lurked. She learned during those early digs that archaeologists in Greece were just beginning to employ the much more fine-scale water flotation method to the soils of ancient sites, and as a result more and more fish remains were coming to light. The search for a fishier ancient world, Mylona thought, might be the way forward for her academic career.

Setting out to the University of Sheffield in England in the early 1990s for graduate work, Mylona immediately felt resistance to her newfound focus. Her graduate supervisor advised her against committing to a fish bone master’s degree, instead urging her to specialize in the analysis of mammal bones. Fish bones were a dead end, he maintained. To prove his point, he gave her a book published in 1985 by the historian Thomas Gallant, A Fisherman’s Tale: An Analysis of the Potential Productivity of Fishing in the Ancient World. The book claimed ancient Greek seas were too poor to support fisheries of significance. For decades, that perceived poorness became the accepted defining characteristic of the Mediterranean in academic circles. Because few rivers flow into the Mediterranean, the sea is considered nutrient-starved and described as containing little phytoplanktonic life—oligotrophic in scientific parlance. Without sufficient terrestrial nitrogen and phosphorous, phytoplankton—the very base of the marine food web—are sparse. Indeed, one of the reasons the Med, as researchers affectionately call the sea, shows its clear sapphire face to modern humanity is this paucity of plankton. This “containing little life” framework may be a case of what historical ecologists often refer to as presentism—the tendency to view the past through a present-day lens. Presentism or not, the acceptance of the narrative left Mylona perplexed: an entire theory was based on a narrow selection of evidence.

Back in the 1980s, Gallant and others were focused on ancient economies and building models to predict people’s dietary behaviors in the past. To Gallant, for example, the evidence suggested that given the relatively high population of the Greek coastlines, there was not enough fish to go around. Goat and sheep obviously filled the caloric deficit. “So any calculation based on the few fish bones that were handpicked in Greek excavations at the time made [fish] a very insufficient source of nutrition,” Mylona says.

Having come from a region in northern Greece where fish is an integral part of modern diets, Mylona felt something was askew with this methodology. Over the course of the next 10 years—while earning a master’s and a PhD at the universities of Sheffield, York, and Southampton, and shuttling back to a growing family on Crete—Mylona started assembling the tools she would need to prove the hypothesis of a fishier Mediterranean.

While field excavation is often the most iconic part of archaeology, the real decoding of the evidence usually comes to light in laboratories and offices far away from the site. And so, after we look over Palaikastro, Mylona takes me up along winding roads into the hills of the Lasithi region and eventually brings us to the headquarters of the organization that has supported Mylona’s fish investigations—the Institute for Aegean Prehistory. The institute’s Study Center for East Crete (SCEC), funded by the American philanthropist and archaeologist Malcolm Wiener, is perched atop a site with a sweeping view of the Dikti Mountains and has an architecture designed to recall the airy halls of the Minoan palaces. Once inside, Mylona leads me first past archaeologists and conservators patiently piecing together vast jigsaw puzzles of pottery, then past an illustrator pen-and-inking renderings of sculpture, and finally to her office.

“In order to know what you are looking at, you need first to establish a reference collection,” she says as she pulls out box after box of bones lining her office shelves. A reference collection is a kind of archive of skeletons that allows zooarchaeologists to compare excavated remains with the bones of present-day creatures. “In Greece in 1993, there was not a single reference collection for fish bones—none whatsoever,” Mylona says. “Zooarchaeology is not taught in Greek universities, so there are no university collections of fish skeletons.”

During what was the busiest decade of her life, she made regular trips to the central fish market in Crete’s second-largest city, Chania on the northwest coast, and to moored fishing boats wherever she found them. She bought all the species of fish she could locate. Then she buried them around her home in the north-central Cretan coastal town of Rethymno. After digging them up months later once bugs and microorganisms had eaten away skin and flesh, Mylona scoured, cleaned, and filed away the fish bones like books in a library. When she deemed her collection big enough, she returned to the bones gathered during her first digs and got down to the serious business of seeing what was what.

Counting ancient fish to establish a baseline for classical fisheries may seem like a rather arcane, academic thing to do during a time of climate crisis and profound environmental disruption. But baselines are important. You cannot restore what you cannot remember. That said, the historical baseline that Mylona is heroically unearthing is elusive. Even gathering data on the modern baseline—what is in the sea today—is a neglected science. Ringed by 22 nations that have fished with ever-increasing relentlessness, the contemporary picture the scientific literature paints of the Med is grim indeed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in 2019, only 36.7 percent of the assessed stocks in the Mediterranean and Black Seas were fished within biologically sustainable levels. After the Aswan High Dam near the mouth of the Nile in Egypt was completed in 1970, nutrient flow into the Mediterranean Sea from the Nile Delta has been curtailed, shifting the nature of plankton blooms and perhaps the entirety of the marine food web. Many other dams throughout the region have done similar damage.

Invasive species have further plundered the sea. Since the Mediterranean and the Red Seas were connected by the Suez Canal in 1869 to eliminate an expensive shipping detour around the Horn of Africa, hundreds of alien species have flooded the Med, and the sea is now considered the most invaded on the planet. On top of alien species eating their way through the Med’s forage fish, some species, such as Lagocephalus sceleratus, are dangerously toxic, too.

All of these degradations to a once-productive marine food system are happening in part because, with the exception of small coastal communities, the rest of modern Europe no longer relies on the Med for its survival. If you were to believe the earlier work of other archaeologists, you could be persuaded that this was always the case. The sea may have birthed multiple civilizations, but that’s not how early archaeologists and historians, like Gallant, imagined the past; imagined being the operative word.

As we continue on our odyssey of eastern Crete, Mylona and I eventually find our way down to Mochlos, a one-time fishing village now turned tourist resort an hour’s drive west of Palaikastro—a place that inevitably leads one to compare past and present. We are looking down a steep escarpment out on the bluer-than-blue Aegean, an embayment of the Mediterranean running between Europe and Asia. Before us is a pair of massive stone fish tanks that have been lying at the seafront for more than 2,000 years. Romans created the pens during their occupation of Greece to support a fishing industry that brought in catches live and stored the most precious fish until they could be sold fresh to highly discerning, and rich, customers. Yet even with the investment in infrastructure made for the sake of seafood, Mylona told me, the fish were important to ancient societies even beyond their role on the plate.

“Fish are different,” she says. “Cattle, sheep, goats—these were all animals used for sacrifice in religious rituals. There was a methodology in how you approached their slaughter and treatment. In classical Greece of the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and probably also earlier, they were ceremonially slaughtered and eaten. You find their remains on altars, on places of sacrifice, and everywhere within settlements.” But fish, she says, occupied a place in society more closely linked to the day-to-day, something that is only realized when archaeological evidence is put in context of “softer” remains like ancient literature.

“Fish were more secular,” Mylona explains. “Because fish participated in the vignettes of daily life, we find them a lot in the classical theatrical comedies. The fishmonger who is a cheater. Or the ignorant customer. Or the glutton who wants to buy all the fish in the market—a symbol of someone who is totally undemocratic. In comedy, fish are used to convey what is proper social behavior. Fish are the vehicle that transmits this idea.” Yet, as much as fish were relegated to the comedies, Mylona and her reference collection show fish were a very serious part of society.

To prove her point, Mylona takes me back to her laboratory at SCEC to show me how something as simple as using water to wash and sift through archaeological deposits reveals a different world. Once the large pieces are extracted and cataloged in a first pass, the “fines” are put into the water flotation separator. A series of meshes allows researchers to extract the tiniest of bones from dirt and rock. Finally, Mylona lays out these bits of bones and tweezes them apart, comparing them flake by flake to the bones in her reference collection.

“The thing is that most fish bones are small, especially in this part of the world. Small fish predominate,” she says. But even the larger fish, a grouper of seven kilograms, for instance, leave bones that may be no larger than two centimeters. “You can’t easily see them in the course of an excavation. If you do it out in the open, if the light is not right, and if you are really hot and tired, you may not see it.”

Despite the difficulty, Mylona has been persistent. And the result of all this tedious work was revelatory. At Palaikastro, where fish bones first entered her vision, the four large fish bones that were handpicked in one of SCEC’s buildings were complemented by 4,000 more when water flotation took place. When Greek archaeologists applied the same methodology to coastal sites in the Aegean and even in many inland locations, fish bones were uncovered by the hundreds or thousands in nearly every location. Fish were clearly an important part of the ancient Greek diet: a vast underestimation of the importance of the sea as a source of food had taken place.

Does this persistent and pernicious misapprehension of the importance of fish in the Mediterranean’s past have ramifications for the modern inheritors of the Mediterranean Sea thousands of years later? To probe this question, Mylona turns to her friend Manos Koutrakis who also went down a fishy career path. But where Mylona’s fish are in the past, Koutrakis’s are rooted in the present.

Koutrakis makes his home in Kavala, in northern Greece, near the villages where both he and Mylona grew up. Kavala sits on the Thracian Sea, a region nourished by three large rivers and the outflow of the Black Sea. All this makes it the most productive body of water in the eastern Mediterranean. Koutrakis is the child of a fisherman who worked those waters for 60 years. He feels the pulse of fishing he did as a child, though today Koutrakis does so as a researcher, collecting Kavala data with his team in the Fisheries Research Institute for all the fisheries of northern Greece. Koutrakis routinely interacts with commercial fishermen, parsing through fish auctions and diving the Med regularly in his quest to keep tabs on the national fishery.

Koutrakis is the first to acknowledge there has been a decline in fish populations in the past 50 years. Whereas pre–Second World War small-scale local fishermen, similar to their ancient counterparts, mainly worked the Mediterranean, the post-war era has seen a superstructure of much larger vessels on top of the preexisting locals. This pressure has squeezed the artisanal sector to an ever-greater degree. The problem is that scientists—much like archaeologists pre-Mylona—lack baseline data on modern fisheries in Greece.

“The Hellenic Statistical Authority was not considering the catches of vessels under 20 horsepower until 2015,” Koutrakis says. “But most of the Greek artisanal vessels were probably exactly in this category.” Yes, larger vessels have also impinged on the artisanal sector, but that sector is still there and in business. Furthermore, it was only in 2016 when Greece created an online database to collect data with self-reporting of landings from vessels more than 12 meters in length.

The discounting of data from small-scale fishers means that managers in charge of placing limits in areas and during specific seasons for the most sensitive stocks are in part blinded. In fact, this is all part of what is often called the Mediterranean Exception. Whereas fisheries around the world are increasingly moving toward quota management systems that try to allocate the exact tonnage each fisher may take, management in the Med still relies on much less precise methods. Seasonal openings and closures and mesh sizes of nets are the main tools that managers have to work with. Koutrakis needs the equivalent of Mylona’s water flotation method for sifting the small bones of modern Greek fisheries, and he works toward that.

“The solution is to have good scientific data,” Koutrakis concludes. And slowly that data is being amassed. “Since 2017, EU regulations require more effort on the quality of data collected. Scientific working groups are putting in more effort in assessing more stocks in order to know where the problem is,” Koutrakis tells me. But is this enough? Will the gaps be filled too late? Will Mediterraneans lose what remains of their biological heritage before we have anything that resembles what they’re now only starting to understand is the historical baseline?

Any talk of baselines in fisheries inevitably leads to the work of the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. Pauly famously coined the term shifting baselines back in 1995. The essential premise of the shifting baselines hypothesis is that each successive generation has a diminished view of what constitutes abundance. The memories of the Greek fisherman who might have caught 100 sea bream in an hour are lost to his great-grandson who thinks a 10-fish day is a great success. To understand the actual condition of the sea with respect to the historical baseline, I contact Pauly.

“I don’t accept this idea that the Mediterranean is a poor sea,” Pauly tells me. “This is what people always say—few rivers going into the sea to deliver the nutrients. But we know from Roman records that there was probably a significant population of gray whales in the sea. That these whales brought in nutrients from the wider Atlantic, and through their feces fertilized the sea,” Pauly says. What happened to these whales? “The Romans likely killed them all. Everywhere you look, we have evidence of a more abundant sea.” Sharks are not abundant in the Med, but that’s today. “We just did an analysis of film taken by the Austrian cinematographer Hans Hass in 1942. There are sharks everywhere.”

And what will happen if we never refine our understanding of the historical baseline and use it to set recovery goals for fish abundance and diversity?

“The thing is, you don’t need to have the fish to satisfy most people who visit the Mediterranean. You will have the clear, blue empty water. You will have the seaside developments, this ugly mess of concrete from which people will emerge to swim. You’ll have postcards and souvenirs,” Pauly says. “But you will have no fish. And no one will remember that they were ever there.”

This is, of course, the last thing Mylona wants to see in her home waters. And so, she will keep on cataloging and counting, making a bone-by-bone argument for the legacy of a more abundant Mediterranean. “The interest coming from the European Union is more and more focused on environmental issues,” she tells me. “This is our main problem and that’s where our funding will go. More and more we have to ask questions that are relevant for today. The biggest challenge for archaeologists today is to build bridges with marine biology and conservation, to find ways to use the archaeological and historical fisheries data in meaningful and useful ways.”

The hope and dream is a better memory of the past that will influence our behavior in the future—a baseline shifted back to something closer to the abundance we’ve lost.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

The post An archeologist’s quest to find seafood’s place on the ancient Mediterranean menu appeared first on Popular Science.

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The cost of putting food on the table keeps going up in the United States, especially for vegetables. According to the US Labor Department’s most recent producer price index data, vegetable prices saw a 38 percent jump in November from October’s prices. The cost of veggies is more than 80 percent higher compared to November 2021 prices.

Climate change has played a prominent role in the shortages, according to scientists. The western United States is in the grips of a historic 23 year-long mega drought that has drastically lowered water levels in the Colorado River, which is shrinking. According to NOAA, as of October 2022, there have been more than a dozen weather or climate disaster events that have resulted $1 billion in losses in each instance.

[Related: The numbers show just how devastatingly dry the Western US is right now.]

According to reporting from Bloomberg, the state of Arizona produces 90 percent of the country’s leafy greens annually from November through March, and this year’s crop production was hit hard by the drought. Arizona will also lose one-fifth of its share of water from the Colorado River next year.

California is the US’ top agricultural producer and has lost about $3 billion due to the drought. “There’s just not enough water to grow everything that we normally grow,” Don Cameron, president of the State Board of Food and Agriculture, told the Times of San Diego.

Climate change was front and center at this year’s Colorado River Water Users Association conference, which is normally a largely academic three-day event. “The Colorado River system is in a very dire condition,” declared Dan Bunk, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation water manager. “Flows during the past 23-year period are the lowest in the past 120 years and (among) the lowest in more than 1,200 years,” Bunk told the webinar audience.

According to Bunk, two of the largest reservoirs on the Colorado River are at historically low levels. Lake Mead, located behind the Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona state line is at 28 percent capacity, compared to 100 percent in mid-1999. Lake Powell, which is formed by the Glen Canyon Dam on the Arizona-Utah border was last full in June 1980, and is at 25 percent capacity today.

Stormy weather has also affected this year’s crop yields. In Florida, the devastating Hurricane Ian and late-season Hurricane Nicole cost the state almost $2 billion.

“Every year the farmers who feed our nation get smarter and more resilient, but it’s increasingly stressful to adapt to the extreme variability they face,” Erica Kistner-Thomas from US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, told USA Today. “One year they’ll have the best year ever and then the next year they’ll be hit with a major flooding event or drought.”

[Related: Rain storms have gotten more intense across most of the US.]

Additionally, University of Wisconsin, Madison agriculture and applied economics professor Paul Mitchell told USA Today, “crops are more resilient to dry weather than they were 20 years ago.” He added that as these extreme events devastating crops happen more and more frequently, the crops won’t be able to adapt quickly enough.

“US agricultural productivity is rising, but it’s not becoming more resilient to extremes,” Mitchell said. “When bad years start to line up, are we doing things to prepare for the unusual as it becomes more usual?”

Some ways to help save money as produce and grocery prices continue to rise are to stock up on staple items (flour, canned goods, sugar, etc.) in bulk if possible, always go to the grocery store with a list and ideas of what’s on the menu for the week, comparing prices via a supermarket’s website or app, and trying to alter your menu and use expensive items like meat more sparingly.

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If you are an avocado toast or guacamole enthusiast, there’s a good chance to tasty green goodness you’re eating was grown in Mexico. In 2019, the United States imported $28 billion worth of agricultural products from Mexico, with fresh fruit and vegetables leading the pack.

It turns out that Mexican agricultural dominance goes back centuries, long before Spanish colonization began in 1519. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the agricultural system in the Basin of Mexico, a 3,700 square mile highlands plateau in central Mexico, fed a huge population for the time. Mexico City (called Tenochtitlan) was home to as many as 3 million people, compared with 50,000 in Seville, Spain’s largest urban center.

A study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) details how the Mexica, or Aztecs, were able to achieve such an accurate agricultural calendar.

[Related: Scientists still are figuring out how to age the ancient footprints in White Sands National Park.]

An accurate calendar was crucial to growing the food that fed so many people in a region with a dry spring and summer monsoons. Farmers needed advanced understanding of when these seasonal variations in the weather would arrive, since planting crops too early or too late could have been disastrous. They also needed a calendar that could adjust to leap year.

Colonial chroniclers documented the use of a calendar, but this new research shows that the Mexica used the mountains of the Basin as a solar observatory, and kept track of the sunrise against the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

“We concluded they must have stood at a single spot, looking eastwards from one day to another, to tell the time of year by watching the rising sun,” Exequiel Ezcurra, the study’s lead author and an ecology professor from the University of California, Riverside, said in a statement.

To find the spot, the team analyzed Mexica manuscripts, particularly the ones that referred to Mount Tlaloc. The mountain at the east of the Basin had a temple at its summit. Using astronomical computer models, the team confirmed that a long causeway-like structure at the temple aligns with the rising sun on February 24. Depending upon which calendar (Gregorian or Julian) is used as a comparision, February 23 or 24 is the first day of the Aztec new year.

“Our hypothesis is that they used the whole Valley of Mexico. Their working instrument was the Basin itself. When the sun rose at a landmark point behind the Sierras, they knew it was time to start planting,” added Ezcurra.

When viewed from a fixed point on Earth, the sun doesn’t follow the same trajectory every day. During the winter, the sun runs south of the celestial equator and rises toward the southeast. As the longer days of summer approach, the sunrise moves northeast due to the Earth’s tilt. This process is called solar declination. 

This study is potentially the first to demonstrate how the Mexica were able to keep time using this principle with the sun, and the mountains as guiding landmarks. Learning about these Aztec methods offers a lesson about the importance of using a variety of techniques to solve questions about the natural world.

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

“The Aztecs were just as good or better as the Europeans at keeping time, using their own methods,” said Ezcurra.

The observatory could also have a modern function today. Historical images show that the forest is slowly climbing up Mount Tlaloc, possibly due to an increase in average temperatures at lower elevation. 

“In the 1940s the tree line was way below the summit. Now there are trees growing in the summit itself,” Ezcurra said. “What was an observatory for the ancients could also be an observatory for the 21st century, to understand global climate changes.”

The post The Aztecs’ solar calendar helped grow food for millions of people appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

A longstanding medical myth suggests that taking vitamin B1, also known as thiamine, can make your body repel mosquitoes.

A “systemic repellent” that makes your whole body unappealing to biting insects certainly sounds good. Even if you correctly reject the misinformation questioning safe and effective repellents like DEET, oral repellents would still have the benefit that you wouldn’t need to worry about covering every inch of exposed skin or carrying containers of bug spray whenever you venture into the great outdoors.

Along with thiamine, other alleged oral mosquito repellents include brewer’s yeast, which contains thiamine, and garlic, the legendary vampire repellent. If oral repellents sound too good to be true, it’s because they are.

As a professor of entomology in Taiwan, where the mosquito-transmitted Dengue virus is endemic, I was curious what science really says about food-based repellents. After a very deep dive into the literature and reading practically every paper ever written on the subject, I compiled this knowledge into the first systematic review of the subject.

The scientific consensus is, unequivocally, that oral repellents don’t exist. Despite extensive searches, no food, supplement, medication, or condition has ever been proven to make people repellent. People with vitamin B1 deficiency don’t attract more mosquitoes, either.

So where did the myth that mosquitoes hate vitamins come from, and why is it so hard to exterminate?

Making of a myth

In 1943, Minnesota pediatrician W. Ray Shannon gave 10 patients varying doses of thiamine, which had only first been synthesized seven years prior. They reported back that it relieved itching and prevented further mosquito bites. In 1945, California pediatrician Howard Eder claimed 10 milligram doses could protect people from fleas. In Europe in the 1950s, physician Dieter Müting claimed that daily 200 milligram doses kept him bite-free while vacationing in Finland, and hypothesized a breakdown product of thiamine was expelled through the skin.

These findings drew rapid attention, and almost immediate repudiation. The U.S. Naval Medical Research Institute tried to replicate Shannon’s findings, but failed. By 1949, Californians using thiamine to repel fleas from dogs were reporting it as “completely worthless.” Controlled studies from Switzerland to Liberia repeatedly failed to find any effects at any dose. The first clinical trial in 1969 concluded definitively that “vitamin B1 is not a systemic mosquito repellent in man,” and all controlled studies since suggest the same for thiamine, brewer’s yeast, garlic, and other alternatives.

The evidence was so overwhelming that, in 1985, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared all oral insect repellents are “not generally recognized as safe and effective and are misbranded,” making labeling supplements as repellents technically fraud.

Medical mechanisms aren’t there

Scientists know much more about both mosquitoes and vitamins today than ever before.

Vitamin B1 does not break down in the body and has no known effect on skin. The body strongly regulates it, absorbing little ingested thiamine after the first 5 milligrams and quickly excreting any excess via urine, so it does not build up. Overdose is almost impossible.

As in humans, thiamine is an essential nutrient for mosquitoes. There is no reason they would fear it or try to avoid it. Nor is there evidence that they can smell it.

The best sources of thiamine are whole grains, beans, pork, poultry and eggs. If eating a carnitas burrito won’t make you repel mosquitoes, then neither should a pill.

What explains the early reports, then? Along with shoddy experimental design, many used anecdotal patient reports of fewer bite symptoms as a proxy for reduced biting, which is not a good way to get an accurate picture of what’s going on.

Mosquito bites are followed by two reactions: an immediate reaction that starts fast and lasts hours and a delayed reaction lasting days. The presence and intensity of these reactions depends not on the mosquito, but on your own immune system’s familiarity with that particular species’ saliva. With age and continued exposure, the body goes from no reaction, to delayed reaction only, to both, to immediate reaction only, and eventually no reaction.

What Shannon and others thought was repellency could have been desensitization: The patients were still getting bitten, they just stopped showing symptoms.

So, what’s the problem?

Despite the scientific consensus, a 2020 survey of pharmacists in Australia found that 27% were still recommending thiamine as a repellent to patients traveling abroad: an unacceptable recommendation. Besides wasting money, people relying on vitamins as protection against mosquitoes can still get bitten, potentially putting them at risk of diseases like West Nile and malaria.

To get around the American ban and widely agreed-upon scientific consensus on oral repellents, some unscrupulous dealers are making thiamine patches or even injections. Unfortunately, while thiamine is safe if swallowed, it can cause severe allergic reactions when taken by other routes. These products are thus not only worthless, but also potentially dangerous.

Not every problem can be solved with food. Long sleeves and bug spray containing DEET, picaridin or other proven repellents are still your best defense against biting pests.

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At most family gatherings, a Thanksgiving meal is not complete without the turkey. As the popular centerpiece is carved and served, chances are you’ll be asked: Would you like white or dark meat? And people have some strong preferences for specific slices of the giant bird. Dark meat devotees swear by the juicy tenderness of a plump thigh while white meat lovers will be quick to point out the healthiness in a lean turkey breast. From taste to nutrition, many have debated over which color meat is better.

Turns out, there is no right answer. “White or dark poultry meat, there’s not much of a difference [in terms of health],” says Dong Ahn, a poultry researcher and professor in the department of animal science at Iowa State University. “A lot of people in the US like white meat better than dark meat [in all poultry] because people are afraid of fat and try to avoid fats at all costs. But in other parts of the world, they prefer dark meat because it’s more flavorful.”

Fat vs. flavor

When people say white meat is better than dark meat, chances are they’re referring to saturated fat. “The saturated fat for the dark meat is a little bit higher than white meat,” explains Joan Salge Blake, a nutritionist and professor at Boston University. But, she adds that the difference in fat between white and dark meat can be really small. For example, a three-ounce serving (about the size of your palm) of white meat without the skin is about 125 calories and with less than two grams of fat, Blake says. In contrast, three ounces of dark meat without any skin has 147 calories and five grams of fat—just three more grams of fat from white meat.

[Related: Prep your organs to eat as much food as possible on Thanksgiving]

Dark meat may have increased fat content, but that’s often why people find it more flavorful, says Blake. As fatty acids are exposed to high oven temperatures, the heat oxidizes them into new volatile compounds that enhance meat flavor. Plus, while dark meat is a bit more caloric and fatty, it’s packed with helpful nutrients. The red meat also has a lot more vitamins and minerals—iron, vitamin B-12, vitamin A, and zinc—than lighter, leaner meat. 

Why does turkey have white and dark meat?

Regardless of color, all turkey meat is equally healthy. So why does white and dark meat look so different? That boils down to the muscle activity of the gobbler. Dark meat is typically found in the thighs and legs of the bird. Turkeys spend a lot of time on their gams, standing and walking around. This causes their muscle fibers in these areas to be typically larger and require a constant energy source, Ahn says. Energy is produced using muscle fat and oxygen taken from myoglobin, which are proteins found in muscle cells that capture oxygen from your blood and supply them to working muscles. Myoglobin naturally has a red pigment, and the more active the muscles are in the thighs and legs, the more myoglobin accumulates in the area.

[Related: 5 main dishes to serve up as alternatives to turkey at Thanksgiving]

White meat, on the other hand, comes from the wings and breasts of the turkey. Ahn says white meat has a lighter shade because the structure and muscle composition in these regions are different from dark meat. Turkeys do not normally fly unless startled or in danger—even then it’s only at a short distance and not very high from the ground. Because these muscles are not used often, there is less muscle fiber and, therefore, less demand to make constant energy from muscle fat. As a result, there is less of a  need for myoglobin to shuttle oxygen to these muscle groups. 

If you’re one of the few who hasn’t pledged loyalty to either color of meat, Blake says you can’t really go wrong with any part of the turkey. When cooked properly, the whole turkey is a rich protein powerhouse, she says. “It’s a bird that keeps on giving and giving.”

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Figuring out what to feed a seemingly ever-growing herd of US livestock is tricky. Industrial hemp, however, has grown to a value of $824 million in 2021 and creates some 24,000 tons of leftover organic matter, according to the New York Times. 

The hemp plant is the same species as a cannabis plant, except it contains 0.3 percent or lower tetrahydrocannabinol or THC. New industries making products using the less-potent varieties of THC and tough fabric or plastic alternative materials from the plants fibers have popped up since the 2018 US Farm Bill allowed its production once again. And some scientists have stared to wonder if it could be useable cow feed. 

Well, it depends on if farmers want their cows to get a little stoned.

A new study out this week in Nature Food shows how when cows get their regular feed swapped with hemp, they start to act a little silly, not unlike humans who have recently imbibed with cannabis. Compared to their peers who ate regular corn and hay feed, the hemp cows were more relaxed, yawning and salivating more often, and got into some “pronounced tongue play,” the authors write. Their eyes even got red and droopy, according to the paper. 

[Related: Potty-trained cows could seriously help the planet.]

The main reason for the paper, however, wasn’t to just see cows acting goofy. Currently, you cannot feed livestock the leftovers from hemp in the US. The stoned cow experiment took place in Germany largely to figure out if a hemp-fed cow led to a THC-filled milk. 

In this case, the milk produced actually did have too much THC to be considered safe according to guidelines set by the European Food Safety Authority. “Shortly after starting to feed the industrial hemp, health-significant amounts of delta nine THC and other cannabinoids were detectable in the milk,” according to a release. “When consuming milk and milk products with a delta nine THC content of this magnitude, the acute reference dose (ARfD) of 0.001 milligrams of THC per kilogram of body weight can be significantly exceeded in humans.”

However, the course is easily reversed—milk THC levels drop pretty soon after letting the cows sober up, and especially silly behavior stops within two days.

While having THC-tinged milk consumed by humans probably won’t be on the shelf anytime soon, feeding livestock hemp at a certain level may actually make them more relaxed and live happier, healthier lives, according to other research. This means that scientific research on stoned cows will likely be a somewhat frequent occurrence in the coming years. 

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For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that meat grown in a laboratory is safe to eat, paving the way for more meat alternatives to be sold in grocery stores in the United States.

The regulator evaluated the products made by UPSIDE Foods in California, which creates cell-cultured chicken by harvesting the cells from live birds and growing the meat in stainless-steel tanks. In a press release, the FDA said that UPSIDE can enter markets in the United States after they have been inspected by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and meet FDA guidelines.

[Related: We’re one key step closer to buying lab-grown burgers.]

Under the terms of a 2019 agreement, the USDA and FDA regulate cell-cultured meat together, with the USDA overseeing the processing and labeling of these alternative meat products.

Food sustainability advocates hope that lab grown meat will reduce the need to kill animals and help with the climate crisis. According to a 2020 study published in the journal The Lancet, the global food system is responsible for about 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from animal agriculture. Cultivated chicken was even served to attendees at this month’s COP27 climate change conference in Egypt.

“The world is experiencing a food revolution and the [FDA] is committed to supporting innovation in the food supply,” wrote FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf and Susan Mayne, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in a statement. “Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, and seafood in the production of food, with these products expected to be ready for the U.S. market in the near future.”

[Related: How to enjoy fake meat in a way that actually helps the planet.]

In 2020, Singapore became first country that allowed the sale of cultured meat, when it granted a Eat Just Inc. regulatory approval for its laboratory grown chicken.

Hundreds of other companies are working to replicate the texture and taste of traditional meat to help make this alternative source more appealing to consumers. According to the Good Food Institute, there are more than 151 cultivated-meat companies on six continents that are financially backed by more than $2.6 billion in investments. The Good Food Institute is a nonprofit group that promote alternatives to traditional meat.

While this step is not technically an approval, the FDA says that is has, “evaluated the information submitted by UPSIDE Foods as part of a pre-market consultation for their food made from cultured chicken cells and has no further questions at this time about the firm’s safety conclusion.”

While this specific clearance only applies to food that is made from cultured chicken cells by UPSIDE, the FDA said it is ready to work with other companies developing cell-cultured foods.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

On a snowy January morning in 2022, I walk into Duo, an exclusive little restaurant in the heart of the southern Italian town of Lecce, carrying a polystyrene box filled with two frozen plate-sized jellyfish. Antonella Leone, a senior researcher at the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, is with me holding an authorization letter for chef Fabiano Viva to legally handle the sea creatures. Viva awaits us at the restaurant’s entrance, greets us with a hearty handshake, and takes the cooler. Within minutes, his assistant is defrosting the jellyfish under the tap. Viva laces up his white apron, fills a pot with water, and ignites the stove.

Leone is part of a small group of scientists who have been studying Mediterranean jellyfish for the past 12 years. For the last seven, they have involved chefs, testing ways to get the general public interested in eating the marine invertebrate.

“The idea of eating a jellyfish never crossed our minds, because we would only see one every once in a while,” Leone explains. But as several species of local and alien jellyfish became increasingly abundant—such as in 2014 when a jellyfish bloom saw 400 tonnes of the barrel jellyfish per square kilometer carpeting the massive Gulf of Taranto—Leone wondered what they could do with them.

But convincing Italians to eat jellyfish is like enticing them to try pineapple on pizza––not a simple task. Southern Italians eat octopus, sea urchin, and other sea creatures, but jellyfish are largely ignored. Selling jellyfish for human consumption is prohibited in the European Union, as regulators still do not consider the sea creature a safe, marketable food due to historical lack of interest in them as a food source, which is why Leone arrived at Duo with a permission letter in hand.

Safety concerns around jellyfish don’t seem to be a problem in China, where jellyfish have been on the menu for almost two millennia. (A favorite is an appetizer of chilled jellyfish seasoned with dark vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, chicken stock powder, and sesame oil.) Today, 19 countries harvest up to one million tonnes of the gelatinous sea dweller, contributing to a global industry worth around US $160-million.

Paired with forward-looking chefs like Viva, Leone and her team began researching ways to make jellyfish tasty and safe for Mediterranean menus in 2015. As ocean fish stocks continue to deplete at alarming rates, and jellyfish seem to be thriving, more and more people are asking if eating jellyfish will effectively mitigate the jellyfish problem, and if they will become a sustainable and safe source of food. But can jellyfish become a food of the future, not just for adventurous diners eating at upscale restaurants, but for all?

Jellyfish are in a broad group of aquatic animals that marine biologists refer to as “gelatinous macrozooplankton.” There are some 4,000 known species worldwide, probably others unknown. They can be as small as a cereal flake, like the highly venomous Irukandji box jellyfish mainly found off the coast of Australia, or have tentacles up to 36 meters long, like the enormous lion’s mane jellyfish. Jellyfish are an important part of marine ecosystems and serve as meals to 124 fish species and 34 other animals, such as the leatherback sea turtle.

But all is not well in the jellyfish world. Since the turn of this century, scientists have witnessed a worrying increase in jellyfish populations in various parts of the world. According to Lucas Brotz, a researcher who has long studied jellyfish at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, it’s not easy to understand the reasons behind the phenomenon.

“Not all jellyfish are increasing in all places, but we do see a sort of sustained major increase in many areas around the world,” says Brotz. And there are myriad reasons that could be driving this change, among them alien jellyfish species being introduced into new areas and range expansion as climate change and warming waters favor some species over others.

Like other marine invertebrates, jellyfish will reproduce in great numbers when conditions are right. Nutrient pollution and warming waters in some parts of the world have resulted in higher-than-normal jellyfish blooms and situations that can have negative repercussions on infrastructure, tourism, and more. Video by the Hakai Institute

The jellyfish increase is being felt particularly hard in places like the Mediterranean Sea and along the coast of Japan. Hordes of jellyfish have destroyed fish farms, clogged power plants, capsized fishing boats as they weighed down nets, and upended tourism by making waters unsafe for swimming. And their presence can impact creatures they share the sea with, too.

“Imagine [something the size of] the biggest oil tanker in the world, traveling along the Mediterranean coasts to Israel, consuming all the plankton,” says Stefano Piraino, Leone’s husband and a marine biologist and jellyfish expert at the University of Salento in Lecce, as he explains how massive blooms of jellyfish can hog all the plankton that other planktivores need.

Seeing the new availability of jellyfish in the Mediterranean, Piraino joined Leone in her quest to find possible culinary uses of jellyfish.

Back at Duo, Viva slips on latex gloves and carefully lifts the Rhizostoma pulmo jellyfish from below the running tap. They’re still a bit frozen, quite unlike the dried jellyfish used in Eastern cuisine, which must be rehydrated before use. Viva slips the jellies into a pot of boiling water and starts to stir.

When Leone started studying how jellyfish could be used for food or food ingredients—and how they could be preserved for later use—she stumbled upon one main problem. The primary method to preserve jellyfish, as perfected in Asia, was to dehydrate them using the chemical compound alum. But alum is considered toxic for human consumption and its use doesn’t meet the European Food Safety Authority’s standards. So Leone and her colleagues set out to devise a new and nontoxic way to desiccate edible jellyfish.

Her team overcame the drying challenge by using calcium salts instead of alum and went on to experiment with dried, fresh, and frozen jellies, turning them into mousse, meringue, seasonings, and thickeners.

The magic of turning gelatinous macrozooplankton into food and food products happens in Leone’s lab at the Institute of Sciences of Food Production, where she and her team of seven run their experiments. A long steel testing table with two shelves of transparent jars and scales at its center separates the expansive room. Inside an industrial fridge rest racks of test tubes containing jellyfish extracts to study.

But it is one thing to do research in a lab, and another to convince Italians to consider replacing fish with jellyfish in a soup. According to a 2020 study led by Luisa Torri, a professor of food science and technology at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, there might be some hope for acceptance. The study surveyed 1,445 people on their attitude toward the idea of consuming jellyfish, taking into consideration traits such as age, behavioral habits, and mouthfeel, and showed that young, well-traveled people with higher education levels and sensitivity to the environment are the ones more likely to eat jellyfish.

I fit that category, so when Viva invites me to take a whiff of the white foam now bubbling rapidly on the stove, I try to keep an open mind.

I close my eyes and breathe deeply. “It smells like oysters,” I tell him.

“You need to disconnect your brain from what you know,” says Viva. “You need to detach yourself from the food in your memory.”

Is the key to accepting an unusual food making new food memories? If that’s the case, we’ll need to find a way to get jellyfish from the sea to dinner tables.

As well as helping to deal with future seas full of jellyfish, fishing for these creatures has been touted as a way to help small-scale European fishers, who are struggling with low fish stocks.

“A source of income? That would be great!” says Rocco Cazzato, a sixth-generation small-scale fisher from Tricase Porto, at the idea of fishing jellyfish. “But I would never eat them, not even if it’s the last thing left in the world to eat.”

Cazzato recounts the pain of pulling on his fishing nets crowded with jellyfish that he could not sell, and he says that if jellyfish were in demand locally like the commonly consumed scorpionfish, those jellyfish in the net would help small fishers like him make ends meet.

Although Leone is working to fill the information void, knowing which jellyfish are edible and safe for consumption is still a question few researchers are tasked with answering. According to Brotz, while many different jellyfish types are increasing worldwide, only a handful of them are preferred for human consumption. And just because they seem to be more abundant, it doesn’t mean that fishing them will be a panacea. The title of a 2016 paper Brotz coauthored says it all: “We should not assume that fishing jellyfish will solve our jellyfish problem.”

The paper advises caution: jellyfish are understudied, and the effects of removing them from the ecosystem, even when they are in excess, are unknown and potentially negative. Some jellyfish, for instance, act as nurseries for juvenile fish, and jellyfish can be both predator and prey in food chains.

Silvestro Greco, research director at the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station, echoes the concern that fishing isn’t necessarily the way to combat jellyfish blooms. He fears that once industrial jellyfish extraction begins, quick depletion might have unexpected consequences on local marine environments. In the early 2000s, for instance, a portion of the fishing fleet in the Gulf of California, Mexico, diverted its efforts to harvesting jellyfish. Fishers and processing plant workers quickly profited from the new market, but overfished the resource, leading to the rapid depletion of jellyfish.

Still, some fishers are poised to launch if a fishery opens—there is already Asian interest in fishing jellyfish in the Mediterranean. But even with interest from fishers, if there’s no market, then there’s no point.

According to Leone, the enterprise of getting jellyfish to the masses needs an entrepreneur willing to invest the several thousand euros needed to request that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) accepts jellyfish as edible food for sale, allowing them to be legally sold in fish markets and restaurants.

Leone believes that, with her team, she’s gathered the scientific research to support such an application to EFSA and that some entrepreneurs have shown interest. It’s only a matter of time before some species of jellyfish make the list of approved European foods, she says, and she’s keen to broker the divide between fishers, markets, and chefs.

Creating this market could help artisanal fishers, the ones most affected by jellyfish blooms, Leone says. “They come back with nets full of jellyfish and three fish inside. If jellyfish would become accepted edible food, they could sell it as sea products like others.”

Leone first targeted curious chefs—ones without preconceptions, eager to accept a challenge—in 2015, and they became important team members. Leone and her team are part of the EU-funded GoJelly project that looked into innovative uses for jellyfish—including in fertilizers, cosmetics, and nutraceuticals, and for snaring microplastics. Membership means that Leone can regularly bring Viva and other chefs jellyfish to experiment with in their kitchens and find ways to make the sea creature appetizing. Over the years, Viva has tried the jellyfish pickled and dehydrated like chips, and as an ingredient in soups and pasta sauces.

The most significant difficulty that Pasquale Palamaro, chef of the Michelin-star restaurant Indaco on the island of Ischia, encountered was the drop in weight as the jellyfish was cooked.

Jellyfish are 95 percent water and a small percentage of proteins, so when the animal dies, it loses much of the water. To avoid this loss, Palamaro believes they have to be consumed fresh within a few hours of harvest or stored safely frozen or preserved with the calcium salt technique that Leone developed.

Palamaro boils the Pelagia jellyfish from the Mediterranean for one minute, marinates it in citruses for an hour, and then seasons it with pumpkin seed oil before serving it with quinoa. Gennaro Esposito, chef of the Michelin-star restaurant Torre del Saracino in Vico Equense, prefers to pair the jellyfish with marinated cucumbers, chili kefir, and lettuce paste. Leone has collected the more successful recipes of these chefs and others in the freely available European Jellyfish Cookbook.

But not all chefs are convinced of the jellyfish’s culinary potential. In 2017, Greco, a marine biologist but also a food scientist and an avid cook, fried 50 kilograms of Pelagia jellyfish at the Slow Fish conference in Genova, Italy, to create awareness about the rapid rise in jellyfish numbers in the Mediterranean.

“It was a success,” Greco says, “but because they were fried. Everything fried is good.”

He believes jellyfish don’t have an interesting texture and don’t make a compelling case for culinary indulgence. All in all, he doesn’t believe that jellyfish will be quickly adopted by cuisines that traditionally never used them.

But according to Leone, jellyfish today are in the same situation as tomatoes in the 16th century. Tomatoes, now a key ingredient in traditional Mediterranean cuisine, were unknown before being brought over from the Americas around the 1550s. At first, they were thought to be toxic and unhealthy. Still, possibly thanks to forward-looking cooks, or simply because of necessity, tomatoes began appearing on pizzas and in parmigiana and pasta sauce, ultimately becoming part of the Mediterranean diet.

Whether or not jellyfish take a similar trajectory and become accepted in Western markets is hard to say, but many of our favored seafoods are declining or have already collapsed explains Brotz. “We may get to a point where there is no other seafood available.”

Back in the kitchen at Duo, Viva has turned one of the two jellyfish into a soup, adding tomato sauce, olive oil, a garlic clove, and a pinch of parsley. He offers me a serving.

I spot the turgid tentacles and part of the cap floating in the orange liquid, and my stomach turns. The first spoonful of broth goes down quickly. It tastes like a delicious––and fishy––tomato soup. Then I search for a piece of the jellyfish. I hesitate. I slurp it up.

It feels like a gulp of the sea itself as the flavor of the jellyfish unfurls in my mouth with the strength of a tsunami. The texture reminds me of calamari or a piece of fat from a cooked steak. As I chew, trying to repress the impulsive disgust, I think of cooked tripe. I swallow.

I look at Viva and say, honestly: “It tastes like the sea!” He smiles, agreeing.

As I take a few more polite spoonfuls, the words of Esposito, the chef of Torre del Saracino, come to mind. He’d pointed out that jellyfish carry a stigma of fear, but that the instinct to avoid them can be unlearned. Through cuisine, “we transform a fear and a dread into a taste, which is better,” he said.

I reflect that my hesitancy might be a result of cultural heritage—this food is as unfamiliar to me as a tomato was to my ancestors over 500 years ago—as Viva prepares the other jellyfish. He coats it with flour and deep-fries it in vegetable oil.

This time, it is crunchy and crispy—like a French fry. And, of course, it tastes great.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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Rooftop gardens are a great way to make urban communities more sustainable, economical, and enjoyable for residents. That said, there’s a reason they aren’t as ubiquitous as many would expect—because of issues such as increased solar radiation and higher wind speeds, the conditions generally aren’t as favorable for plants as they are at ground level. Thanks to recent breakthrough developments, however, rooftop yields could dramatically increase thanks to some ingenious rerouting of buildings’ typical carbon dioxide emissions.

According to a paper published last week in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, researchers constructed a new ventilation system reliant on a Boston University building’s normal carbon exhaust system to act as fertilizer for both spinach and corn crops. Meanwhile, control plants grown nearby employed their own fan system to ensure airflow sans building emissions. The resulting yields were noticeable, to say the least.

[Related: The complete guide to building a rooftop garden.]

“Spinach grown next to the exhaust vents had four times the biomass of spinach grown next to a control fan,” explains the paper’s announcement, adding that, “even when high winds decreased the size advantage, the plants were still twice as large as the controls.” Interestingly, even though the corn was predicted to benefit less from the extra CO2 than spinach (whose photosynthesis pathways are more influenced by CO2 levels), its yield was still two-to-three times larger than the control crops.

CO2 exhaust occurs both naturally and artificially in buildings, including sources like humans’ everyday exhalations and HVAC systems. To maintain healthy air quality—less than 1000 parts per million (ppm)—the toxic gas is usually released into the outside air via those same HVAC systems and ventilation. The research team’s reroute funnels some of what would otherwise become wasted and generally harmful emissions towards the rooftop gardens, where it can then be absorbed by plant life.

“We are hoping this could lead to the further development of this system and eventual implementation in rooftop gardens and farms,” said research lead Sarabeth Buckley in the announcement. “If that happens, then hopefully more rooftop farms will be installed. They could provide a multitude of environmental and social benefits such as energy savings for the building, carbon drawdown, climate mitigation, urban heat reduction, local food production, community building opportunities, and aesthetic and mental health benefits.”

A few hurdles remain before city residents can expect to see similar systems on their own roofs, including optimizing air application design and addressing adverse wind speeds. Still, the breakthrough system’s benefits are already stark enough that they provide a promising lead for creative solutions to improving urban sustainability programs. And in any case, we all could probably benefit from a bit more spinach in our diets, anyway.

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“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” or so the old saying goes. Nutrition remains a powerful tool to prevent certain types of illness. The right food also play a role in helping serious or diet-sensitive diseases, like diabetes, HIV, and heart failure. A common way for those with illnesses like these is through medically tailored meals (MTM) customized and prepared for a patient’s needs. These meals can also be used for those facing food insecurity and those recently discharged from the hospital.

Meals catered to specific medical needs also have the potential to save a lot of money.

A study published today in JAMA Network Open finds that adding more programs that make and deliver MTMs could prevent hospitalizations nationally and save approximately $13.6 billion each year. The study used data from the 2019 Medical Expenditure Survey Panel Survey and other published research on the health impact of MTM programs. It found that implementing more of these programs around the country could also help prevent 1.6 million hospitalizations in addition to the huge cost savings. Most of the cost savings would occur within public programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

[Related: 5 nutrition goals that are better than weight loss.]

Kurt Hager, a PhD candidate in the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition and Science and Policy program led the study. “Currently, MTMs are not a covered benefit under Medicare or Medicaid, so they remain unavailable to the vast majority of patients who might benefit from them,” Hager said in a press release. “For people with chronic illness and physical limitations that make it difficult for them to shop and cook for themselves, these programs are a highly promising strategy for improving health and well-being. The estimated reductions in hospitalizations and associated cost savings reflect that.”

The majority of MTM programs around the country are run by organizations like Community Servings, God’s Love We Deliver, and Food is Medicine. Representative Jim McGovern, D-Ma has also introduced the Medically Tailored Home-Delivered Meals Demonstration Pilot Act of 2021, a pilot program for the the largest-ever MTM program under Medicare. They are currently funded though a mixture of by grants, donations, and Section 1115 waivers under Medicaid. The meals also often serve those with lower incomes and limited mobility, as well as individuals who regularly experience food insecurity. Most programs deliver five lunches and five dinner per week to eligible patients.

[Related: Unscrambling the health effects of eggs.]

“Food is not just for prevention–it can be used for treatment for people with debilitating conditions like heart failure, uncontrolled diabetes, HIV, and cancer,” Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor at the Friedman School and senior author on the paper, said in a press release. “With medically tailored meals, patients are treated using the power of food and put on a steady path toward healing. Our study suggests that expanding medically tailored meal programs nationwide—one key recommendation of the new Biden-Harris National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health—would help reverse our ‘sick care’ system, keep people out of the hospital, and save billions of dollars each year.”

Researchers form Tufts University are now working with Community Servings and University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School on a multi-year evaluation of MTM programs in Massachusetts. The work will study how these MTM programs impact obesity, diabetes, nutrition insecurity, and health care utilization in the state.

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The baby formula shortage is far from over, but to prevent future scarcity, the United States is taking a critical look at what went wrong earlier this year. On September 20, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released an internal report on the fumbles and mishaps that led to a delay in response to the formula crisis. A number of reasons were listed, including outdated data systems, insufficient emergency response systems capable of managing multiple public health emergencies, and lack of consumer education on how to handle and prepare infant formula. The agency also acknowledged that there are many unknowns about the bacterial contaminant Cronobacter, which was reportedly found in baby formula products from Abbott Nutrition. 

“The baby formula shortage was a perfect storm,” explains Jenelle Ferry, neonatologist and director of feeding, nutrition, and infant development at Pediatrix Neonatology of Florida. “You had a combination of COVID pandemic restrictions, supply chain issues, and now you’re involving a situation with a company [Abbott Nutrition] that is a major manufacturer of formula products.” 

On February 17, 2022, the FDA sent out a warning to consumers to stop using powdered infant formula from Abbott Nutrition after concerns of bacterial contamination in its products. Shortly after, Abbott voluntarily recalled infant formula products and shut down the facility during the ongoing FDA investigation. Before the recall, the company was responsible for 40 percent of infant formula production. The uncertainty of when products would be back on shelves led to panic buying, making them hard to find. “The situation created unrest and distrust of the whole process, and I think families did not know what to believe or what was safe for their babies,” says Ferry.

[Related: What the FDA is doing about the US baby formula shortage]

Ferry explains part of the reason for the mistrust is the lack of understanding behind what actually happened to the babies who allegedly drank formula contaminated with Cronobacter. An initial report indicated that babies got sick with Cronobacter after drinking similar—but not the same—formula from Abbott, she says. “It’s very misleading to say the formulas was contaminated because it’s not clear [if] the two infants that died did because of Cronobacter.” Testing later revealed that Cronobacter was on some surfaces of the manufacturing plant, but tests to identify the bacterial strains in the infants found they did not match those found in the factory. Ferry says the results get “muddier” because the strains found in the baby formulas were different from each other, which suggests that it’s unclear where the bacteria originally came from.

This isn’t the first time Cronobacter has been a problem in such products—the bacteria is a known contaminant of infant formula. Richard Martinello, an infectious disease expert at Yale School of Medicine, says that the bacteria is naturally present in the environment and has a preference for very dry environments, such as dry powdered baby formula. It is an opportunistic bacteria that causes severe infections in vulnerable populations such as infants with less developed immune systems. While Cronobacter infections rarely happen—two to four cases are reported each year in the US—an infected infant (less than one year old) may experience symptoms ranging from fever, seizures, to meningitis. If untreated, there is a high chance of death or for the meningitis to lead to long-term neurological issues.

Ferry stresses that when you look at the contamination, you have to ask what was first exposed and where. She says the Cronobacter was not directly found in any of the recalled items—making it possible that the product was exposed to bacteria from other environmental conditions or handling rather than a contaminated ingredient. There are also a lot more opportunities for the formula to have picked up the bacteria, such as on countertops, storage, and even at home when the infant formula is not safely handled or prepared. 

Among the FDA’s suggested areas of improvement, Martinello says it is important to create a system to make Cronobacter cases a reportable disease where states can identify infections. Doing so will help better understand the frequency of cases and allow more opportunities for scientists to study the bacteria.

[Related: 3 solutions for when you can’t find your baby’s formula]

Infant formula is regulated as a food product, but experts agree it’s a life-saving item for babies under six months, when milk is the primary source of nutrition. Arik Alper, a pediatric gastroenterologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine, explains that infants and toddlers with special needs were hit hardest by the low stock of infant formulas. Abbott is a major producer of special formulas for babies that have food allergies, an inability to digest certain proteins in the diet, or have a disease where they need non-dairy formulas, says Alper. “If you need a standard formula there are other options, but we have a problem when special formulas are not available,” he says. “It’s not easy [for babies] to adjust to a new formula and the transition may be associated with gastrointestinal problems such as vomiting or irregular bowel movement.”

Ferry says the only alternative to safely and adequately feed a baby under six months when infant formulas aren’t available is breast milk. However, she points out that often people choose infant formula because breastfeeding is not an option for all caregivers. Another possibility is to find other brands of infant formulas, although that is less of an option for infants with special needs. Though he does not recommend it, Alper has seen some parents create their own formula recipes in a blender at home. He says this would be better suited for older children and if a parent insisted on making their own stock, the process should be supervised by a nutritionist to ensure a nutritious and balanced diet. One thing he advises against is parents diluting their existing stock of formula to make it last. To provide a growing child 100 percent nutrition, “you need to make sure they get enough calories—they need enough nutrients, vitamins, and fiber,” Alper says.

Production at Abbott’s Michigan plant resumed in early July. Currently, the FDA is forming groups that will work on improving the gaps uncovered in the baby shortage investigation and will reevaluate their progress in a year.

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Good news for kale haters everywhere—you’re not alone in your dislike of the bitter leafy green. And that dislike may have began way earlier than you thought. A study from scientists at Aston University in the UK and the National Centre for Scientific Research-University of Burgundy, France offers a rare look at the faces fetuses make depending upon the food their mothers eat.

The study, published this week in the journal Psychological Science, took 4D ultrasound scans of 100 pregnant women ages 18 to 40, at weeks 32 and 36 of pregnancy to see how the fetuses responded after being exposed to flavors from foods eaten by their mothers. The moms were asked not to consume any food or flavored drinks one hour before their scans and also not eat or drink anything with carrot or kale the day of the scan as a control. The mothers were then given a single capsule containing about 400mg of carrot or 400mg kale powder roughly 20 minutes before each ultrasound.

When exposed to carrots, fetuses showed a “laughter-face.” Kale, on the other hand, often led to a “cry-face” response.

“It was really amazing to see unborn babies’ reaction to kale or carrot flavors during the scans and share those moments with their parents,” lead researcher Beyza Ustun, a postgraduate researcher in the Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab at Durham University, said in a press release.

The findings could help further our understanding of development of human taste and smell receptors, and the researchers also believe that what pregnant women eat might influence babies’ taste preferences after birth. It could also help better understand the importance of taste and healthy diets during pregnancy.

[Related: A simple blood test could save new mothers. Why aren’t more doctors using it?]

“A number of studies have suggested that babies can taste and smell in the womb, but they are based on post-birth outcomes,” Ustun explained, “while our study is the first to see these reactions prior to birth. As a result, we think that this repeated exposure to flavors before birth could help to establish food preferences post-birth, which could be important when thinking about messaging around healthy eating and the potential for avoiding ‘food-fussiness’ when weaning.”

A control group of fetuses, whose mothers weren’t given a tablet and not exposed to either flavor, shows that exposure to just a small amount of carrot or kale flavor was enough to stimulate a reaction.

[Related: Should pregnant people not drink coffee? The answer is complicated.]

“Looking at fetuses’ facial reactions we can assume that a range of chemical stimuli pass through maternal diet into the fetal environment,” said co-author Benoist Schaal, of the National Centre for Scientific Research, in a press release. “This could have important implications for our understanding of the development of our taste and smell receptors, and related perception and memory.”

The team has begun a follow-up study with the same babies post-birth. So stay tuned to see if kale leads to cry face after the womb—and if any of the snacks from their pre-birth days impact their acceptance of different foods.

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GENERALLY SPEAKING, humans will try to eat anything at least once. Some anthropologists theorize that prehistoric people sussed out what was edible by trial and error, but we haven’t stopped pushing our palates in new, sometimes dangerous directions. The risk of illness and even death is often baked into our favorite flavors and fares. Here are some beloved bites that can kill—if things go awry.

Fugu

A dash of danger is part of the appeal of this lean and mild whitefish, which is served as slivers of sashimi in select Japanese restaurants. Tetrodotoxin, a paralysis-inducing chemical that disrupts the connections between neurons and muscle cells, collects in the liver and sex organs of this family of pufferfish. Japan’s health ministry requires fugu chefs to be certified in properly cleaning and removing the potentially deadly body parts. Yet some diners insist that a hint of risk gives the dish its allure. A possibly apocryphal tradition holds that culinary masters know just how much toxin should linger on the meat to provide a pleasing tongue tingle.

Hot dogs

Franks have long been a leading cause of choking in young US children due to the all-American food’s shape, size, and texture. Health experts advise parents against cutting dime-size medallions for tykes to chew on; instead, the sausages should be sliced into thin strips, then chopped into smaller pieces. But that’s not the only way a wiener can get you: The American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Health Organization suggest limiting consumption of all processed meats, because emerging evidence links them to an increased chance of colorectal cancer. Hot dogs may also be associated with higher risks of cardiovascular disease, according to a 2021 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Almonds

Wild almonds are slightly different from the domesticated seeds found in grocery stores. These bitter varieties produce amygdalin, a compound that our bodies convert to cyanide. The sweet almonds we usually eat have a genetic mutation that means they produce less of this respiratory toxin than the fatal doses found in the wild. Some foodies claim that a sprinkle of the bitter varieties is the key to deepening the taste of nutty confections. Heating or boiling them beforehand is the best way to dissipate the poison.

Potatoes

This humble root vegetable’s sprouts, leaves, stems, and flowers contain a harmful compound called solanine. Even the flesh of the spud can have high quantities of the noxious stuff—at least once you see it go green. Potatoes, like almost all plants in the nightshade family, produce solanine to ward off insects. As they make the chemical, they amp up their chlorophyll too, creating an unappetizing shade of chartreuse. But don’t fear the oft-maligned green chip: Eating the occasional off-color potato is probably fine, though it may have a slightly acrid taste. Just don’t make a habit of chowing down on taters past their prime: an excess of solanine can cause vomiting, paralysis, and even death.

Wild mushrooms

A frequently cited proverb states that “all mushrooms are edible, but some only once.” Even safe fungi can be tricky, with many poisonous look-alikes that can lead amateur foragers astray. Amanita phalloides, for example, can resemble a benign white mushroom like the paddy straw to the untrained eye. But this unassuming species is called the death cap for good reason. It contains lethal amatoxin, which holds up even after thorough boiling. And don’t trust your nose or tongue to sound the alarm in time to save you: Writer Cat Adams reports in Slate that “many people who are poisoned claim the mushroom was the most delicious they’ve ever eaten.”

Maggot cheese

Casu marzu is a Sardinian sheep’s milk cheese with an added kick: living larvae of the Piophila casei fly. As maggots eat their way through the fermented dairy, their digestion transforms it, making it softer and creamier. Many diners praise its intense and unique flavor, which is said to be tangy, nutty, and a bit bitter. It also holds the Guinness World Record for the “most dangerous cheese” because the live grubs can contaminate the product with unsavory bacteria—and, if swallowed whole, can potentially nibble on the diner’s intestinal tissue. Unsurprisingly, this product is globally banned from sale, but adventurous eaters in the know continue to indulge.

This story originally ran in the Fall 2022 Daredevil Issue of PopSci. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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While this upcoming long weekend may call for celebrations, this time around maybe reconsider breaking out the hot dogs, soda, and pre-packaged snacks. Two large-scale studies link overconsumption of “ultra-processed foods” to an increased risk of a number of ailments, including obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, early death, and more.

The authors defined ultra-processed food as “industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods (oils, fats, sugar, starch, and proteins), derived from food constituents (hydrogenated fats and modified starch), or synthesized in laboratories from food substrates or other organic sources (flavor enhancers, colors, and several food additives used to make the product hyper-palatable).” This definition is based on the NOVA Food Classification System.The paper published on August 31st in The British Medical Journal (BMJ) include two studies, one conducted in the United States and one in Italy.

The stateside study looked at 200,000 people (59,907 women and 46,341 men) for up to 28 years. Each study participant completed a questionnaire every four years, listing how often they ate about 130 different foods, ranging from non-processed foods like fruit all the way to ultra-processed like bacon. The long-range surveys found a link between ultra-processed foods and colorectal cancer in men, but not in women. Men in the highest quintile of ultra-processed food consumption had a 29 percent higher risk of developing colorectal cancer than those in the lowest quantile. The results of the Italian study found similar dangers in ultra-processed foods.

The reasons behind the differences between sexes is not yet clear.

[Related: Here’s why ultra-processed foods are so bad for your health.]

“We found an inverse association between ultra-processed dairy foods like yogurt and colorectal cancer risk among women,” said co-senior author Fang Fang Zhang, a cancer epidemiologist and interim chair of the Division of Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Science at the Friedman School, in a press release. Colorectal cancer is the third most diagnosed cancer in the US and is among the fastest-growing cancers in those under the age of 50.

Mingyang Song, co-senior author on the study and assistant professor of clinical epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, added that, “Further research will need to determine whether there is a true sex difference in the associations, or if null findings in women in this study were merely due to chance or some other uncontrolled confounding factors in women that mitigated the association.”

A wide body of research has associated processed meats (bacon, salami, beef jerky, etc.) with a higher risk of bowel cancer in both men and women. The connection remained even when accounting for factors like dietary quality and body-mass index. This new study found that all types of ultra-processed foods, not just meats, played a role to some extent.

“We started out thinking that colorectal cancer could be the cancer most impacted by diet compared to other cancer types,” said Lu Wang, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts, in the press release. “Processed meats, most of which fall into the category of ultra-processed foods, are a strong risk factor for colorectal cancer. Ultra-processed foods are also high in added sugars and low in fiber, which contribute to weight gain and obesity, and obesity is an established risk factor for colorectal cancer.”

[Related: The truth about counting calories.]

The researchers recommend that ultra-processed foods be replaced with unprocessed or minimally processed foods to decrease the risk.

The Italian study began in 2005 and followed 22,000 people in the country’s Molise region. It was designed to assess rick factors for cancer, heart disease, and brain disease. The researched also published in the BMJ also compared the role of nutrient-poor foods (high in sugar and saturated or trans-fats) with ultra-processed foods in the development of early death and disease.

“Our results confirm that the consumption of both nutrient-poor or ultra-processed foods independently increases the risk of mortality, in particular from cardiovascular diseases,” said Marialaura Bonaccio, epidemiologist of the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention at the IRCCS Neuromed of Pozzilli and lead author of the study, in a press release.

When the team compared the two types of food to get a sense of which contributed the most, they found that the ultra-processed foods were “paramount to define the risk of mortality,” according to Bonaccio. “This suggests that the increased risk of mortality is not due directly (or exclusively) to the poor nutritional quality of some products, but rather to the fact that these foods are mostly ultra-processed.”

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Death can come in many forms, watermelon included. If we can ­stomach enough of them, many of our daily foods are lethal. Down 30-​plus glasses of water in a few hours, for instance, and you’ll do yourself in. (One major cause of ­MDMA-​related deaths: water intoxication caused in part by drug-induced extreme thirst.) Of course, the human stomach usually doesn’t hold much more than 4 cups, but the toxic effects of overindulgence can build up as your intestines move the food along. Here’s how much you’d need to eat of a few foods to flirt with fatality.

1. Beef liver

Organ meats pack more nutrients than muscles. Livers in particular contain so much vitamin A that overindulgence overloads our own livers—and increases intracranial pressure to hazardous levels.
Average Woman: 770 cups (359 pounds)
Average Man: 924 cups (431 pounds)

2. Avocado

This fatty fruit contains almost twice as much po­tas­sium as a banana. When too much of the metal hits the bloodstream, it interrupts the heart’s rhythmic beating, causing it to slow—or even stop.
Average Woman: 250 cups (200 fruits)
Average Man: 300 cups (240 fruits)

3. Dark chocolate

Like caffeine, the theobromine in cocoa dilates blood vessels and increases heart rate. Scarf enough, and these effects can combine to drop pressure while speeding up your ticker: total shutdown.
Average Woman: 82 cups (332 bars)
Average Man: 98 cups (398 bars)

4. Watermelon

Heaps of any fluid-rich fruit could kill you. Cells inundated by water expand to normalize their electrolyte balance. Swelling like this in the brain can damage nerve cells and pinch off the oxygen supply.
Average Woman: 80 cups (3 melons)
Average Man: 130 cups (4 melons)

[Related: Yes, coffee drinkers seem to live longer. But don’t get too excited.]

5. Coffee

Too much caffeine can make you dizzy, raise your blood pressure, and even give you seizures. Way too much can send your heart into fibrillation, an arrhythmic beat that fails to pump blood.
Average Woman: 50 cups
Average Man: 70 cups

6. Nutmeg

Eat as little as 6.5 teaspoons of this holiday spice to get a 12-hour high (and a two-day hangover), thanks to the psychoactive chemical myristicin. Eat multiple cups to trigger organ failure.
Average Woman: 22 cups, ground
Average Man: 27 cups, ground

[Related: How many hot dogs would it take to kill you?]

This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.

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Minimizing the risk of living on an unlivable planet requires significantly reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through various means, like shifting to renewable energy and electrifying sectors that rely on fossil fuels. In countries like Finland and Sweden, taxes play a key climate role, especially when it comes to policies that charge a fee based on the carbon content of fossil fuels.

However, emissions caused by agriculture must be addressed, too. “The food we eat is the biggest cause of biodiversity loss in the world and the second biggest source of greenhouse gasses, so it’s very difficult to address those problems without considering the food system,” says Ian Bateman, co-director of the Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute (LEEP) at the University of Exeter.

Is there a way to take the idea of carbon taxing to the grocery aisle? New research suggests that tax policies could minimize GHG emissions and improve dietary quality at the same time. But they may have a disproportionate impact on low-income communities if implemented inefficiently.

Carbon and health tax policies may improve human and environmental health

According to a new Nature Food study, a combined carbon and health tax policy on food products would significantly impact consumers’ purchasing decisions. These taxes would apply to carbon-intensive foods like beef or unhealthy foods like alcohol and sugary drinks. A healthier and more environment-friendly grocery run can reduce GHG emissions and improve the quality of diets at the same time.

The authors considered two approaches to address biodiversity loss and increasing GHG emissions: providing information about food products’ carbon and health impacts and imposing taxes based on their carbon and health impacts.

[Related: Why is it so expensive to eat sustainably?]

The authors, including Exeter’s Bateman, conducted a survey by replicating an online supermarket to determine how information about carbon or health impacts, taxation, and combined information and tax affected consumers’ purchasing decisions. Almost 6,000 participants reported their usual food and beverage purchases for the baseline scenario. 

Afterward, they were presented with the same list of products but with additional product information or new prices, depending on the hypothetical policy instrument. They faced one of three scenarios: carbon information and tax policies, health information and tax policies, or an unexplained tax followed by carbon and health information. After product info was added or prices changed due to the chosen policy instrument, participants were allowed to revise their food purchase choices if they wanted to. Looking at shopping lists before and after policy interventions permitted the authors to see the effect of different policies on food purchase behavior and, subsequently, on GHG emissions and dietary quality.

Both measures—providing carbon or health information and adding carbon or health taxes—helped move consumption towards healthier or lower-emissions foods, says Bateman. “Taxes were more effective than information, but the biggest effect is when both are used together,” he adds.

Additional taxes may have a disproportionate impact

The concern about carbon and health taxes is the potential disproportionate burden on low-income communities. The poor might be unable to afford even a slight price increase on commodities like food or fuel, leaving them even more vulnerable. 

It’s important to ask whether different demographic groups spend the same proportion of household incomes on specific food products. If not, carbon and health taxes may have a different impact on high- and low-income communities, says Aseem Prakash, professor of political science at the University of Washington, Seattle and founding director of the UW Center for Environmental Politics. Health taxes (also called sin taxes) on food, alcohol, tobacco, and soft drinks generally take a greater share of income from the poor than from the wealthy.

[Related: Which veggie oil is most sustainable? It’s complicated.]

Revenue recycling, or using the tax revenue for a designated purpose that will benefit society, can help mitigate the regressive effects of carbon taxes, says Prakash. For instance, tax revenues could fund public transit, social safety net programs, and public school education.

“The money raised by the taxes should be used to reduce other taxes on the poor—such as income tax—until you reach the point where the income [tax] of the poor is fully compensated for the price rises,” says Bateman. “There will still be an incentive to buy lower tax foods so they are still effective in changing purchasing, but the tax redistribution means the poor can now afford to buy more high health, low carbon foods.”

Bateman adds that these tax policies must be revenue neutral to avoid a disproportionate impact on low-income communities, who are most likely to be affected by climate change and health problems. Revenue neutral means that the government’s overall tax revenue does not change. Instead, the gains from taxing high-emission and unhealthy food products are utilized and returned to the public. 

Taxes on food alone will not change the food system entirely. However, they can be part of a broader range of policy measures, such as cutting subsidies for producing unhealthy and high-emission foods and boosting investments toward producing healthy and environmentally friendly foods, says Bateman. After all, taxing certain foods only helps if good alternatives are available. 

“There are several other tools that can be used as well, including information campaigns,” says Prakash. “If we want individuals to drive less, we must give them low-carbon options to meet their transportation needs. Thus, taxes could shape behaviors more effectively if individuals have other options with similar costs and convenience.”

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The journey to completely slaughter-free meat products has been a long one. There’s mounting evidence that producing animal products is a huge bane on the planet. For those carnivores who love to bite into a beef burger or a tasty chicken nugget but can’t bear to contribute to the often controversial ways that meat is produced, there are plenty of alternatives options. Substitutes like tofu patties don’t always seem to perfectly scratch that itch for meat-lovers. 

One solution that many scientists and the food industry have studied is developing lab-grown meat—that’s where actual animal cells are taken from an animal and are grown independently in a lab setting. So, real chicken cells would be in those nuggets, but no actual chicken has to die in order to get your savory snack. And these lab-grown foods have already been made—California start-up Eat Just’s no-kill chicken meat was approved for sale in Singapore in 2020, and Hong Kong-based Avant Meats developed lab-grown edible fish maw.   

But, the holy grail of lab-curated meats scientists are reaching/aiming for is beef. Beef is infamous for its carbon footprint, as well as its difficulty to be recreated as cultured cells. In 2013, a Dutch scientist pioneered the first lab-grown beef burger, but the catch is the animal-saving meal sold for around $330,000. Unlike birds and fish, it just so happens that mammalian cells are significantly trickier and more expensive to handle.

“This is a challenge because, as you know, mammalian cell culture is super expensive,” says Kasia Gora, synthetic biologist and co-founder of cell-cultured meat company SCiFi Foods. Currently, biopharma companies are the primarily large-scale lab developers of mammalian cells, explains Gora. This cell line research has been important in early stage pharmaceutical development, but the processes are expensive. “It works and it’s fantastic if you can charge $1,000,000 a gram for your product,” Gora says. “But food has to be cheap.”

[Related: How to enjoy fake meat in a way that actually helps the planet.]

However, Gora and the team behind SCiFi Foods, previously called Artemys Foods, have made a breakthrough—cow cells that can reduce the cost of cell-cultured beef by 1000 times. The trick, according to Gora, is a combination of single-cell suspension and CRISPR gene editing. 

Typically when growing cultured cells, they need to stick on to something to start growing. “Most animal cells prefer to grow attached to a solid surface, which mimics the conditions they would find themselves in within an animal body,” says Liz Specht, vice president of science and technology at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit focused on alternative protein acceleration. “But when growing cells at large scale, being limited to surface-adherent cells presents a challenge because you need a lot of surface area, think of how thinly cells grow on the surface of a cell culture dish, to make a lot of meat.”

To combat this, typically companies will use tiny beads for the cells to glom on to, but as the cell masses accumulate this can become bulky and bump or damage other growing cell beads, Specht adds. Her team has found that a more effective approach is growing in single-cell suspension, or when cells just grow floating around on their own like yeast in a brewery vessel. Without the beads or any surface at all, costs go down and efficiency goes up. 

Gora and her team have made impressive strides with a single-cell suspension approach that’s resulted in beef that’s not too far from the real thing. Using CRISPR Cas9, the scientists can reduce functions of certain genes or replace them with other wildtype genes to convince them that they are “happy growing in single cell suspension,” says Gora. The team can then pop these cells into bioreactors, which are vessels made for growing organisms under controlled conditions, making scaling up is pretty straightforward, she adds. 

There is a big difference between SCiFi’s product and the super-expensive Dutch lab burger, though—these cells are going to be used as an ingredient in mostly plant-based burgers instead of making up the whole thing. So instead of building up the scaffolding of a fully lab-beef burger from scratch, Gora says using the structure of a veggie burger will bring the best of both worlds.

“Fundamentally, the strategy solves the cost problem with cultivated meat, and it has the benefit of solving the taste problem of plant-based meat,” she says. The company forecasts that a pilot run of their burgers should be priced around $10 per burger. But it will still likely be a handful of years before the average grocery shopper can try one, especially since the FDA has yet to approve a product like this to sell for consumption. 

As with most developments in alternatives to meats, there are legitimate concerns with the future of cultured cell meat. The Counter published an in-depth report on some of the major questions that still stand with these kinds of products—such as the likelihood that these projects could be reliably scaled up, the problem with potentially harmful viruses infecting living cells in a culture, or the feasibility of producing certain cells without collecting fetal bovine serum from slaughtered cows. Some scientists argue that there could be more climate change impacts from lab-cultured meat than traditional methods. 

Scientists have also expressed concern that cultured meat doesn’t necessarily change or shift our thinking on the current unsustainable food system in place today. “But if cellular agriculture is going to improve on the system it is displacing, then the critics are right: it needs to grow in a way that doesn’t externalize the real costs of production on to workers, consumers, and the environment,” write researchers at Duke University and Johns Hopkins University, in an article for the Guardian. 

While many components of the research and production process still need to be refined, the era of lab-grown or cell-cultured meat is fast approaching.

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The food and beverage industry—a major supply chain that encompasses farming, processing, and food distribution practices—is part of the global food production system, which is currently responsible for around 26 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The United States has the largest food and beverage industry in the world and is also the largest market for eating out in restaurants and cafes based on consumer spending.

For restaurant owners, this is a huge opportunity to push for sustainable eating. New research seems to suggest that it’s possible for restaurants to move their customers toward low-emissions eating through menu design reconfigurations.

Putting carbon labels on menus and switching defaults may reduce carbon emissions

A recent study published in PLOS Climate found that the design of restaurant menus is capable of influencing customers’ dish choices. Make those dish choices more climate-friendly, and there’s a chance for a reduction in the carbon footprint of the meal. 

The authors created various menus for nine different hypothetical restaurants while employing two different interventions: indicating the amount of GHG emissions of each dish (also known as the carbon label) and putting lower-emission dish choices as the default menu option. The carbon labels also had a stoplight-colored signal to indicate the degree of GHG emissions, which meant that red was used for high-emission, yellow for medium-emission, and green for low-emission dishes.

About 265 participants—the majority of whom were German residents—chose dishes online after viewing nine menus. Each of the nine menus had two types: one with carbon labels and one without. Three menus were unitary, offering dishes that were either high-, medium-, or low-emission. Meanwhile, six menus were modular, which meant that every dish had a high-, medium- or low-emission option. The modular menus either had no default option or have either red or green dishes as the default.

Based on the experiments, participants reduced the choice of red dishes when carbon labels were present and the defaults were switched, like making the veggie burger the standard instead of the beef burger, says author Benedikt Seger, postdoctoral research scientist in the department of Developmental Psychology at the University of Würzburg. It also increased the decision to munch on green dishes to a limited extent.

“The default switches were associated with a reduction of 300 to 500 grams of CO2 equivalent, depending on whether we compare them to menus without any defaults or menus where the ‘red’ dish was the default,” says Seger. Meanwhile, the carbon labels were associated with an average reduction of 200 grams of CO2 equivalent, he adds.

Conducting the experiments online was one of the limitations of the study since real restaurant settings would have more influence on customers’ dish choices, such as the order of other guests. “We would expect that the CO2 reduction effect of carbon labels and default switches would be lower [in real restaurants] than in our online study,” says Seger. 

The overall design of the menu must be considered

Although the study showed promising results, carbon labels may not be effective if customers don’t look at them in the first place. A 2019 study published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism found that carbon labels on restaurant menus are not enough to influence customers to order low-emission dish choices because customers don’t always pay attention to the labels.

“We measured their eye movements, so we know exactly how much attention they paid to [the carbon labels],” says author of the 2019 paper Sara Dolnicar, social scientist at The University of Queensland, Australia. “People are fascinated when they first see them, but then focus on the food, not the emissions.” According to their findings, the participants only spent about 5 percent of their time looking at carbon labels, which indicates that it doesn’t play a big role in their dish choices. However, there are a few consumers who do care about the carbon labels, she adds.

But the two studies had a big difference in menus—the decision to include food photos or not.

The carbon labels in the 2019 study did not grab the participants’ attention because the menus included colored pictures of the dishes, argues Seger. This has implications for other informative menu elements as well, such as health, organic, and veggie labels. “The more such labels we include, the less potential each of them has to change customers’ behavior, because attention is a limited resource,” he adds.

There are various explanations as to why the menu design interventions in the 2022 study worked. For instance, having a stoplight-colored scale helps because green labels are more socially approved than red ones, says Seger. Moreover, switching the defaults and making low-emission dishes the standard can be effective because default choices function as recommendations, which tell the customer that it is “normal” or “usual,” he adds.

The challenge is to find a balance of reducing emissions without upsetting customers, says Dolnicar. “Defaults are always the most powerful option,” she adds. “The best default, of course, is to just sell vegetarian dishes, but gentler nudges could help also.” Rearranging the order of the meals on the menu, or having a low-emissions menu as the default and providing a conventional menu only upon request, may be beneficial. 

The best part of these changes for restauranteurs is that they don’t require changes to the food that they offer and may even encourage other restaurants to follow suit, says Seger. In the long run, customers may also change their habitual dining behavior, he adds.

“To put it simply, we need to cut carbon emissions in every sphere of life,” says Seger. “So why should dining make an exception?”

The post Should restaurants put carbon footprint labels on their menus? appeared first on Popular Science.

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