Nutrition
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While world cereal production is heading towards a modest decline in 2009, it will still be the second highest after last year’s record. Total cereal utilization will expand in the new season (2009/10), albeit at a slower rate than in 2008/09. Feed utilization is expected to be most hit by the current economic slow down, and register only a modest increase, but growth in industrial use of cereals may also lose steam in the new season. Food cereal consumption is expected to keep up with population growth, at the global and even national levels in most countries. Overall, the anticipated decline in world cereal production is likely to be offset by a draw down from stocks carried-over from the current season, and as such, supply is foreseen to be sufficient to meet the expected demand.
Food Outlook, June 2009
Tofu can harm environment more than meat, finds WWF study - Times Online
London is the global capital for “divorce tourism” with marriage break-ups involving foreign nationals accounting for a sixth of cases before the courts.Originally hailed as wonderful, soya can be bad for your health. | Life and style | The Observer
On a crisp winter morning in Belfast, Dr Lorraine Anderson was nearing the end of her doctorate research project. She had spent weeks hunched over a microscope looking at samples of sperm. Anderson was trying to figure out what made some sperm move slower than others. As a specialist in reproductive medicine at Belfast's Royal Maternity Hospital she was particularly interested in why some samples moved so sluggishly that they would have trouble reaching and fertilising an egg. Anderson knew that a sperm's 'motility' was one of the critical factors in fertility. 'It doesn't matter how many sperm a man's got; if they can't get from A to B then there's little chance of reproduction,' she says.
Photo via stock.xchng by bouwm019 Should we be eating more beef in order to slow global warming?
In Defense of the Cow: How Eating Meat Could Help Slow Climate Change : TreeHugger
Edited by Christopher B. Field, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, CA, and approved September 15, 2004 (received for review May 21, 2004) Abstract
Curbing the U.S. carbon deficit — PNAS
Effects of native grazers on grassland N cycling in Yellowstone National Park | Ecology | Find Articles at BNET
Large herbivores are a major and integral component of nitrogen (N) cycling in grazed grassland. Grazers directly remove plant N and spatially redistribute it within ecosystems. Indirectly, large herbivores can accelerate N cycling by: (1) increasing litter turnover during trampling (Ruess 1987), (2) recycling N in forms more available to plants and soil microbes than those found in the original forage (Floate 1981, McNaughton et al. 1988), and (3) reducing litter and soil C:N ratios (Davidson and Milthorpe 1966, Evans 1973, Hodgkinson and Baas Becklng 1977, Shariff et al. 1994) and, consequently, lowering microbial immobilization (Holland and Detling 1990, Holland et al. 1992). Large herbivores also promote N loss from grasslands via ammonia volatilization from urine patches.
Of all the potential solutions for global warming, this has to be one of the, well, most unusual: “Eat a local grass-fed burger.”
Ode Magazine : Down and dirty
News | Health A few researchers are turning their attention to the sunshine vitamin as a culprit, prompted by the experience of immigrants that have moved from their equatorial country to two northern latitude locations HELP FROM THE SUN? Some researchers are turning their attention to the amount of vitamin D a mother and infant get to try to trace autism.
What If Vitamin D Deficiency Is a Cause of Autism?: Scientific American
Dietary fat intake and subsequent weight change in adults: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition cohorts. Forouhi NG , Sharp SJ , Du H , van der A DL , Halkjaer J , Schulze MB , Tjønneland A , Overvad K , Jakobsen MU , Boeing H , Buijsse B , Palli D , Masala G , Feskens EJ , Sørensen TI , Wareham NJ . The objective was to assess the association between the amount and type of dietary fat and subsequent weight change (follow-up weight minus baseline weight divided by duration of follow-up). We analyzed data from 89,432 men and women from 6 cohorts of the EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) study. Using country-specific food-frequency questionnaires, we examined the association between baseline fat intake (amount and type of total, saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated fats) and annual weight change by using the residual, nutrient density, and energy-partition methods.
Dietary fat intake and subsequent weight change in... [Am J Clin Nutr. 2009] - PubMed result
Why is it so easy for us to believe that fat is a bad dietary ingredient? The idea is that fat has nine calories per gram, and carbohydrates and protein have four calories per gram, and somehow the theory is that the denser the calories, the more easier it is for us to eat more of them. What happened is in the '50s and '60s, when researchers started fingering fat as a cause of heart disease, the obesity researchers, the obesity community started advocating low-fat diets, which they had never done before. A low-fat diet is by definition a high-carbohydrate diet. But you had this sort of synchronicity where you had the heart disease people saying, "Give up fat, saturated fat, for heart disease," and the obesity people started saying, "Give up fat because it must be the best diet because fat is the densest calories."
frontline: diet wars: interview: gary taubes | PBS
The Food Lab: Perfect Boiled Eggs | Serious Eats
Note: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (of Good Eater ) brought his analytical cooking expertise to us last week in his first installment of The Burger Lab . This week he starts another bi-weekly column, The Food Lab, dedicated to unraveling the science of cooking. Today, learn about what happens under the shell when boiling eggs and how to make the perfect soft and hard boiled eggs.On a farm in coastal Maine, a barn is going up. Right now it's little more than a concrete slab and some wooden beams, but when it's finished, the barn will provide winter shelter for up to six cows and a few head of sheep. None of this would be remarkable if it weren't for the fact that the people building the barn are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower , and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post 's gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it.