There's a new study out that has some bad news for Splenda users. According to the research, the sugar substitute may "suppress beneficial bacteria in the gut, and cause weight gain." It may also block absorbtion of nutrients.

The study was performed on rats and conducted at Duke University in North Carolina. However, it was co-sponsored by the Sugar Association, and the makers of Splenda were quick to respond. This could be a new, real health concern, or it could be a new battle in the sugar/Splenda war, or both.

While I'm not personally a fan of Splenda (just don't like artificial sweeteners), but I know that lots of people depend on it for sweets. I think this may be a wait and see situation, but may also be something to keep in mind next time you open a packet.

A recent study found that cherry tomatoes grown in salt water can turn out tastier and heartier than ones grown normally, partially because the plants have to fight harder to fight the environmental stress and produce more compounds to help them cope. These compounds contain antioxidants like Vitamins C and E, which have healthy effects on those who consume the fruit.

The solution only contains 20% seawater. Unfortunately, not all genotypes of tomatoes react in the same way to the salt water. Some die because they cannot counteract the free radicals from the solution, so don't try to do this with larger tomatoes; it probably won't work. In the study, the water was constantly circulated and the pH controlled by a computer, so the researchers promise that the tomatoes won't taste salty.

The researchers, based at the University of Pisaone in Italy, are encouraging the growth of tomatoes in brackish water, because it will not only lead to juicier, healthier tomatoes, but will help to preserve our freshwater supplies.

Researchers from Exeter and Oxford U asked 740 pregnant women (all first-time moms) to keep a food diary during their gestation periods.

Their findings? That women who ate more food and more nutrients were 24% more likely to give birth to a boy (specifically, 56% of the women in the group who ate the most gave birth to boys). The average woman who gave birth to a male consumed 2,413 calories a day and ate foods containing potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. The odds of having a boy were also higher among women who consumed one bowl of cereal every day (though the researchers didn't specify whether the bowl was eaten at breakfast or not).

But some people are wary of the stats, saying that a man's sperm ultimately decides whether a child will be male or female, and that diet has little or nothing to do with it.

If anything, hopefully the study will remind and encourage pregnant women to eat a healthy, well-balanced meal no matter what sex their baby turns out to be.

According to an article that appeared yesterday in British newspaper, The Guardian, the newest frontier in food is in the area of nanofood development. With nanotechnology, food could be manipulated to taste great, be low-fat and last forever, because it alters the food on an atomic level. For all the potential good this science could do, researchers are hesitant to move too far forward this work. Their reservations are due, in large part, to the backlash that genetically modified foods have received in recent years.

It's a lengthy article, with far more detail that I can neatly summarize here. It's eye-opening, in part because the possibilities are appealing and frightening. I personally believe that we should leave food alone, as it seems that every time we start messing with our food, we make the situation worse not better. However, with the food supply uncertainties we may in the years to come, it makes me wonder how science could help feed the world.

[via The Morning News]

Despite urges from various British food organizations, the European Food Safety Authority decided against banning additives in food.

Their reasoning? A recent £750,000 study, which found a link between eating food loaded with additives and colorants and impulsive/hyperactive behavior in kids, was not a substantial enough reason to ban the additives entirely. In the study, eight and nine year olds who had ingested food with additives could not sit still long enough to complet simple tasks, like a 15-minute computer exercise. (Yeah, but neither could most of the eight year olds I know, with or without stimulants. Heck, most 25 year-olds I know don't have the patience to finish a 15-minute computer task).

But the study did prompt some retailers to change their ways: Marks and Spencer, a British department store that sells everything from shirts to iPods to gourmet foods, vowed to stop selling food and drink that contain additives by the end of the month.

The study results should not be ignored, but I don't blame the EU for not jumping to conclusions. Banning food with additives falls along the same lines as banning food with trans-fats, and I have the same opinion in each case: use your own good judgment and discretion. If packaged foods make your kid hyperactive, don't buy the foods, or at least limit their intake. Simple as that.

[via] Times Online

A group of scientists at Nestlé Research in Switzerland have come up with a machine that will rapidly taste and rate as many as eight different kinds of espresso. The ratings, they say, will be as accurate as if tasted by...well, actual people.

According to an article in Live Science, the machine analyzes the gases released by the espresso, and then interprets the data as "cocoa," "citrus," or "toffee," for example.

Sounds intriguing, and it could definitely save time. But do we really want to let a machine take the place of a task that people already perform well? It's not as if there is a sudden, increased demand in coffee taste testers, or that they are not adequately performing their jobs. ("Toffee?! No way. I distinctly detected citrus notes...you're fired.") I don't think that we're somehow missing out because our coffee isn't properly classified. Perhaps the machine is more discerning?

Cool invention, but for right now, I'm comfortable in the notion that my espresso has been categorized by humans, thanks.

Recently, German researchers fed lab mice separate "human" and "chimp" diets, and within just two weeks, were able to notice distinct psychological and genetic differences in the rodents.

There were three different diets: a raw food-only diet; meals from the researchers' local cafeteria; and a pure fast-food diet. The researchers found a huge difference in the livers of the mice with a chimp diet versus those with a human diet (I'm scared to hear about the difference in their hearts and arteries!) They found thousands of differences in the genes expressed in the mouse livers, which they think may be caused by our differences in diets.

...You got all that? Okay. The scientists also found that said genes seemed to evolve faster than other genes.

So, basically, our ancestors' adoption of meat and cooked foods may have shaped us into the carnivorous, brownie-eating, beer-guzzling beings we are today.

We've known for years that sugar isn't good for us. It promotes tooth decay, provides quick highs and lows and offers nothing but empty, nutritionless calories that pack on the pounds. However, it appears that it is even worse than we previously thought. Researchers recently determined that refined sugar is actually more addictive than cocaine. In a recent study rats were given a choice between sugar water and cocaine, and 94% them chose sugar. Even the rats that had previously been addicted to cocaine switched to the sugar once it was a choice. No wonder it's so hard to give up that 3 pm pack of M&M's, it's more addictive than illegal drugs.

[Photo: Godi]

Researchers in the U.S. and Thailand have discovered that the more fruit you have in an alcoholic drink the better it is for you.

It's actually the ethanol that you find in drinks such as rum and vodka. When it is added to fruity drinks it actually makes the fruit part of the drink even healthier.

Is this really surprising news for anyone? We know that some alcohol, in moderation, can be good for you, so it stands to reason that if you add fruit to the mix they're going to add vitamins and minerals and nutrients. Though the fact that certain alcohol can actually increase the power of the fruit is interesting.

So there you go, another reason to have a Hump Day Happy Hour after work today.

Nutritionists and researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston set out to try and discover whether dairy foods in general had any effect of fertility on humans, as there was "pretty strong evidence" that an excess of lactose in animals could have a negative effect on the ability of females to conceive. Everyone was surprised to find that the same result was not found in humans. The records, taken from 1991-1999, of nearly 19,000 women from the ages of 24-42 were examined.

It turned out that they found that women who ate two or more servings of low-fat/non-fat dairy foods and no whole fat dairy had an 85% higher risk of becoming infertile. Eating one serving of whole fat dairy per day significantly reduced the odds of developing infertility. The type of infertility most commonly found in this study was anovulatory, a failure to produce eggs. One possible reason for this result is that low fat dairy foods tend to have more lactose in them than full fat products, but scientists say that more research is needed before anything can firmly be concluded. And they do "not recommend that women trying to conceive use this as an excuse to eat "buckets and buckets of ice cream."

The average American chews nearly 2 pounds of gum each year. Most like the flavors or the mouth-freshening feel of mint gums, but there is far more to gum-chewing than what your taste buds experience. Scientists are continually finding new ways that gum can benefit us, from the alertness brought on by the simple activity of chewing to the potentially medically beneficial ingredients that can be added by gum manufacturers to turn it into the "delivery vehicle of the future".

Medical benefits from gum? You better believe it! Studies show that gum chewing is can help fight the development of cavities by stimulating the production of acid-neutralizing saliva. Xylitol, a common gum ingredient, has been shown to have more specific cavity-fighting properties, as well. It can also, as noted above, help to fight bad breath.

Gums available in Europe and Asia have ingredients like green tea extract, calcium and other nutritional supplements that would typically be found in a vitamin pill. Some children's gums already contain Vitamin-C, for instance. In addition to replacing vitamin pills and supplements, some doctors are considering gum as an alternative to pill-forms of prescription medicines because they would make medicine so easy to "take." Of course, the overall effectiveness of such a plan has not yet been thoroughly tested, although it is known that many substances are very easily absorbed through the gums, but because gum "can contain as many as 70 ingredients" it is certainly possible for thousands of different formulations to be put together.

Attention all mothers-to-be: some new research done by the U.S. National Institutes of Health has shown that eating more fish and seafood while pregnant could have a positive effect on the intelligence of children in the long run compared to the children of those women who ate less seafood, or none at all. The omega-3 fatty acids in seafood play an important role in fetal brain development, and the additional benefit that can come from eating more than 12-ounces of seafood (about two meals' worth) a week. Lower consumption, in spite of the fact that the government recommends no more than 12-ounces a week, did nothing to help fetal development.

The study looked at the children of 8,000 British women, tracking them from before birth to the age of 8. On average, they "were more advanced in developmental tests measuring fine motor, communication and social skills as toddlers, behaved better at age 7, and earned higher verbal IQ scores at age 8."

One of the controversial things about this study is the fact that so much seafood is affected by pollution - specifically mercury, which can damage the nervous system. In this study, a negative impact on the children was not found, but researchers say that solid evidence of the benefits of seafood should motivate the legislature to "take [further] actions to keep pollutants out of seafood."

We already know that not all kids like vegetables and that preferences may even be genetic when it comes to overall eating habits, but that doesn't explain why kids entering adolescence eat fewer veggies than they did when they were younger.

In a report that appeared in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers noted that there were two big drops during a five year period in the amount of fruits and vegetables that teens, both jr. high and high school students, ate. One dip occurred early in adolescence and another occurred late. In both cases, consumption dropped by 1/2 serving - which could be a substantial percentage if the kids were not eating the recommended minimum number of servings a day to begin with. Researchers don't yet know why these drops occur, although it is possible that access to vending machines at jr. high schools (not present in elementary schools) and access to cars/fast food in high school may contribute.

A new study gives a good reason for young women to switch to whole grain bread and to generally increase the amount of whole grains in their diets. Conducted at the University of Leeds, the study showed that women who ate at least 30 grams of fiber each day cut their breast cancer risk by half.

The average fiber intake in the UK is 12 grams per day for adults and 15 g per day in the US. Since the results of the study suggest that benefits will not occur when women eat less than 20g per day, it is worth noting that there are a couple of easy ways to eat more fiber. A medium apple, for example, has 4g of fiber. An artichoke, cooked, has 4.5 grams. Beans vary in their fiber content, but tend to have around 16gper cup. 1/2 cup of corn has 5g. There are many other vegetables and fruits that provide low calorie ways to add fiber to the diet, as well.

The benefits of eating more fiber could be overridden by other factors, including weight, but a generally healthy lifestyle that includes the recommended amount of fiber should decrease the risk enough to make dietary changes worth the effort for young women.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh say that they have developed a genetically modified chicken that lays cancer-fighting eggs. The eggs themselves don't fight cancer (although that does present an interesting mental picture), but they do contain a very high concentration of a potentially cancer-treating protein in their egg whites. This particular protein has been used to develop cancer antibodies before.

These eggs are still being studied, and the first "production line" is about five years away, by some estimates. A few other groups, including the US company AviGenics in Georgia and GeneWorks in Ann Arbor, Michigan, have also been working on developing on producing similar antibodies in egg protein, research which may help to speed the process up. Imagine the surge in popularity that the egg white omelet would have if they were to become commercially available!