Meet The Team / Jan Ellen Spiegel

No breakfast, no weight gain? Not buying it.

That sound you hear is eyebrows rising on more than a few nutrition and obesity experts. A new German study is challenging one of the most basic and longstanding tenets about weight and eating: that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Researchers at Technical University of Munich found that people who ate more food for breakfast didn't cut their calorie intake at other meals to compensate – they simply ate more.

The researchers looked at 380 subjects -- 280 obese and 100 normal weight -- who kept track of what they ate for about two weeks. Breakfast foods varied, but when subjects, normal or obese, ate at least 400 additional calories for breakfast, they wound up eating 400 more calories for the day.

"Reduced breakfast energy intake is associated with lower total daily intake," the study's conclusion said as reported in Nutrition Journal. "The influence of the ratio of breakfast to overall energy intake largely depends on the post-breakfast rather than breakfast intake pattern. Therefore, overweight and obese subjects should consider the reduction of breakfast calories as a simple option to improve their daily energy balance."

It's long been exasperating to the organic food industry -- the oft-stated belief that organic food is most notable for what it doesn't give you – all those yummy pesticides and chemicals. Nutritionally, common wisdom goes, organic food is no better for you than the conventional stuff.

Maybe not.

A study by researchers at Newcastle University,in England, published in the Journal of Dairy Science, has poked a hole in that thinking, showing that organic milk does have some nutritional advantages over conventional -- less saturated fat and more "good" fatty acids -- specifically omega-3s.

Testing 10 organic and 12 conventional milks sold in British grocery stores (not raw at the farm), seasonally over two years, lead researcher Gillian Butler found the organic milk more consistently showed healthier fat levels, which she believes is a result of the cows' greater reliance on grazing and their ingestion of larger amounts of clover -- typically planted in organic operations for the nitrogen that conventional fertilizers would otherwise provide.

Whole Foods is no stranger to veggies – even the frozen kind, and it's no stranger to healthy food. And for folks who can't quite get the two of them in synch, the natural-food grocery giant is now doing the thinking for you -- this week officially launching a new line of eight frozen vegetable blends designed to pack specific nutritional punches.

Beans and Greens, for instance, is a high-fiber-and-iron blend of kidney beans, great northern beans and kale. Leafy Greens is a high vitamin A mixture of collards, kale and mustard greens. Garden Blend hits vitamins A and C with carrots, broccoli and sugar snap peas. It also includes single veggie packages of collard greens and blue curled kale – two of the most nutrient-dense vegetables around.

"There was definitely a plan to make sure we were hitting nutrient density and creating a product that was more than just a bag of frozen vegetables," said Chris Slick, Whole Foods' Senior Global Coordinator for Exclusive and Store Brands.

You know that little voice in your head that looks at a big plate of fresh cookies and whispers, "You'd better eat just one?" Turns out, in people who are already obese, it may be a teeny-tiny voice or missing altogether.

That's the finding of brain researcher Dr. Antonio Convit, a professor of psychiatry and medicine at the New York University School of Medicine and the Nathan Kline Institute, reports New Scientist magazine. Convit and others have long been aware that type 2 diabetes is associated with memory difficulties, the result of a diabetic's inability to increase fuel for the brain to conduct the kind of problem solving that will, for instance, allow them to remember where the heck they put their car keys.

Figuring something similar might occur in people who were obese, Convit looked at the brains of 44 middle-aged obese people and 19 lean ones, using MRI's and other tests.

What he found were changes in the obese subjects in two parts of the brain that play major roles in eating. In obese people there was more water in the amygdala, which, among its functions, regulates feeding behavior. He also found that the orbital frontal cortex of the brains of obese people was smaller, which meant it had less ability to perform one of its key functions -- inhibit automatic responses -- such as the impulse to eat that whole plate of cookies.

Ketchup may still be king of the condiments, but these days, hot sauce is what's really hot. According to a report by market-research firm Mintel International, sales of ethnic condiments in the U.S. had been chugging along since 2005, but beginning in 2008, when the recession hit and folks started eating at home more, they've been hot as a habanero, increasing 4.8 percent in 2009, with $1.3 billion in sales. Mexican condiments are leading the way in this salsa-powered surge.

That's no surprise to Gloria Cabada-Leman, owner with her husband of the Carolina Sauce Company, in Durham, N.C. Started in 2003, Carolina Sauce is an Internet food retailer specializing in condiments and sauces. She said hot and spicy is a predominant theme these days even in places like New England and the Midwest -- normally bastions of hot-pepper wimipiness.

The most recent trend, Cabada-Leman said, is adding jalapeños (the gateway pepper, she called them) or even habaneros to items that normally don't have them – like ketchup. "In just the past 12 months or so, it has had the greatest increase in sales," she said. "Customers trying it and then coming back as repeat customers."