La Cámara de Semillas del Día del Juicio Final. Las instalaciones en el Ártico preservan todas las especies de cultivo posible. La "caja de seguridad" creada para proteger la diversidad genética de los alimentos del mundo cumplió 6 años en este 2014. Las avanzadas instalaciones albergan 820,619 variedades de semillas en Svalbard, un archipiélago situado en el océano Ártico y perteneciente a Noruega, detalla Luigi Guarino, científico senior del Fondo Mundial para la Diversidad de los Cultivos, una de las organizaciones con participación en la bóveda.
El objetivo de la bóveda es preservar con seguridad tantas variedades de especies de cultivo como sea posible, antes de que desaparezcan. Debido a que hemos llegado a depender de un puñado de variedades de frutas, verduras y granos de alto rendimiento, miles de otras variedades están desapareciendo a un ritmo alarmante. Muchas universidades e institutos de investigación de todo el mundo ya cuentan con sus propios bancos de genes de los cultivos alimentarios ? Cebada "cerveza del espacio" What do dictators like to eat? 4 December 2014Last updated at 19:46 ET You are what you eat - but also how you eat and who you eat with. Food can affect your mood, your bowels and your world-view, write Victoria Clark and Melissa Scott, authors of Dictators' Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants. In this age of the foodie, the gourmand and the gourmet, we have taken a fresh look at some of the worst dictators of the 20th Century by subjecting them to culinary scrutiny.
Without seeking to mitigate their crimes by humanising them we wanted to cut them down to human size. The line between man and monster can be very thin. Although forced to conclude that evil-doing and delusions of grandeur cannot be attributed to the consumption of any single food or any one physical constitution, hints of patterns did emerge. As many dictators aged they grew more and more obsessed with the purity of what they ate. Kim Il-sung had grains of rice individually selected Stalin enjoyed picnics at his dacha How to make Satsivi Method. How sugar affects the brain - Nicole Avena. Dr. Avena’s website has links to new research and articles about the effects of sugar on the brain and behavior, and how this can influence body weight.Want to learn more about the adverse effects of sugar? Read Food Junkie, Dr. Avena’s blog on Psychology Today. Here is one post that is particularly relevant: Sugar Cravings: How sugar cravings sabotage your health, hormone balance & weight loss, by Dr.
Nicole Avena and Dr. Sara Gottfried.Watch this video from The National on how food manufactures have tweaked products to increase the addictive nature of processed foods.For an in-depth presentation on the research surrounding sugar overconsumption, watch Dr. Wrap-Genius - A personal journey into better food labeling. Could Personalized Food Labels Help You Eat Better?
Nutrition is a slippery science, full of research that is constantly debunked by more research. We're left largely confused, pondering whether " vitamins are good for you" or "whether eating saturated fat gives you heart disease. " Sam Slover, a graduate student at NYU, tackled the problem by creating Wrap Genius, a nutrition label that can be customized to accommodate anyone’s diet. “Ideally, I want the label to take into account who is looking at it, and adapt accordingly. We all care about different aspects of food, so a dream label should become personalized to the unique interests, background, and diet of each person,” Slover explains. “More realistically, I want the label to make it easy for people to quickly understand the overall nutritional profile of the food. How many good and bad nutrients does the product have? The label itself is just one part of the greater experience of Wrap Genius, which is full of fantastic ideas.
See the project here. The 5 Fattest States In America. There's a new top state in the obesity stakes, and the dubious honor goes to Mississippi. It now has the highest rate of obesity in the nation (35.4%), replacing West Virginia (34.4%), which had been top state from 2010 to 2012. Montana has the lowest obesity rate, followed by Colorado and Nevada. Gallup's 2013 figures are based on a survey of self-reported height and weight. People are "obese" when their Body Mass Index (BMI) exceeds 30. BMI is a ratio of a person's height to weight that, while a somewhat flawed statistic, is still is one of the most accurate predictors of later disease and mortality. You can see all the states in Gallup's obesity map here. According to Gallup, the states with the highest levels of obesity also have higher rates of obesity-related disease.
Cutting obesity levels improves people's health, but also reduces pressure on the overall health care system. [Images via Shutterstock] Your Fat Is Why You're Not As Bright As You Could Be. Obesity doesn't make you less intelligent, but it might cloud your cognitive abilities. In a recent study, conducted by researchers at Georgia Regents University, the blood of obese mice had especially high levels of a chemical called interleukin 1, a substance born from fat cells that can cause inflammation. When the researchers later examined the obese mice brains, they found that interleukin 1 had passed the blood-brain barrier—something that normally should not be possible.
The substance had seeped into the hippocampus, an area responsible for memory and learning. The mouse brains also had high levels of inflammation and low levels of a biochemical important to synapse function (synapses ensure messages travel efficiently between neurons). These findings led to predictable results in how the mouse brains worked: Other obese mice did poorly on mouse-sized cognitive tests, presumably because the interleukin 1 was clogging things up. How Ingredient Lists Would Look For All-Natural Foods. Nothing can put a person off eating a thing like the ingredient list.
(Well, except maybe the calorie count.) Once all those unpronounceable words that start with "dextra-" and "benzo-" and "butylate-" start piling up, the dreaded high-fructose corn syrup count becomes the least of concerns. Foods with chemical-rich ingredient lists like these seem far away from the world of biology, but of course it takes a little chemistry for even all-natural foods to occur as well. Australian chemistry teacher James Kennedy recently created a series of posters that offers a light-hearted rebuke toward the condemnation of chemicals in foods.
He is out to show that even when foods come from the earth, like berries, or from the bodies of animals, like eggs, they are still the result of chemical reactions. Have a look at more of the posters in the slides above. These Countries Are The Biggest Predators On The Planet. Humans, like all other creatures great and small, exist in the global food web. But it's not where you think. We're not on top. When researchers from a number of French marine and agricultural science institutes calculated countries’ trophic levels--essentially, measures of energy that inhabitants consume through eating--they found that consumption habits over the last 50 years varied wildly.
Their data, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also documented a world growing increasingly hungry for meat. To break it down: Trophic levels cover the spectrum of eating habits, from herbivore to the most carnivorous predators. A trophic level of 1 means you’re a plant or plankton, and level 2 means you eat level 1. A level 2.5 might signify a mixed diet of plant and plant-eaters (like a chicken caesar salad), and a trophic level of 5.5 (the highest) likely means you’re a polar bear.
It was probably time to ditch that whole “top predator” nonsense anyway. McDonald's Will Soon Try To Make You Eat Vegetables And Skip The Fries. Slowly but surely, McDonald's is inching towards providing customers healthier options--a reaction, perhaps, to the company's inability to significantly boost sales in recent years as healthier competitors like Chipotle gain in popularity. The fast food chain's latest move: a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) commitment to giving customers who order value meals the option of getting a side salad, fruit or vegetable instead of french fries (but only in its 20 largest markets, though those make up 85% of all sales). So yes, the age-old phrase "Do you want fries with that?
" may soon be replaced by "Do you want fries, a salad, fruit, or a vegetable with that? " McDonald's, which is partnering with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to implement the initiative, won't say exactly what will be in the salads, or what fruits and vegetables will be offered. That will vary by market (Here's hoping nobody ends up with leftover raw potatoes).
Photo by Flickr user 20 frimaire. Best gym commercial ever! Monsanto renuncia a su lucha por la industria transgénica en Europa. El mayor fabricante de cultivos transgénicos del mundo, Monsanto, anunció hoy que renuncia a seguir intentando introducir plantas modificadas genéticamente al mercado europeo. “No vamos a hacer ningún trabajo de lobby más para el cultivo en Europa”, aseguró a un diario alemán el portavoz de Monsanto Europa, Brandon Mitcheneer.
Esta decisión se tomó en base a la débil demanda de los agricultores. “Hemos comprendido que por el momento no existe una gran aceptación al respecto”, comentó la portavoz de Monsanto Deutschland, Ursula Lüttmer-Ouazane. Sin resultados favorables para la empresa estadounidense durante años, consideran que seguir sería contraproducente. El Ministerio de Agricultura alemán rechazó comentar la noticia, pero es conocida su postura contra los productos transgénicos. ALEMANIA CONTRA LOS TRANSGÉNICOS Desde hace años existe un gran movimiento de protesta contra las plantas modificadas genéticamente en Alemania. The Flavor Connection [Interactive] Infographic: A Scientific Map Of Optimal Food Pairings. Happy Thanksgiving! To keep you busy while you recover from turkey coma, we're republishing some of our favorite stories from 2013. Enjoy. --Eds Surf and turf. It sounds like mere decadence--a pairing of premium proteins to assuage the appetites of both cigar-smoking tycoons at Morton’s and soccer moms at Applebee’s.
This is the science of Western cooking. Of course, the Scientific American infographic is actually a reinterpretation a flavor map created by Yong-Yeol Ahn. Up top, you have roast beef--the food that shares the most chemical compounds (or food relatives) with other foods. Roast beef's link to peas is especially notable, because peas sit way down on the tree. The more time you spend exploring the graphic, the more “aha” moments you’ll have.
Try it here. [Hat tip: FlowingData] [Image: Peas via Shutterstock] Consumir vitaminas sinteticas en exceso puede ser peligroso - Noticias de Salud, Educación, Turismo, Ciencia, Ecología y Vida de hoy. A raíz de que la consagrada cantante pop Katy Perry envió por Twitter, a sus 37 millones de seguidores, una foto con bolsas etiquetadas con las vitaminas que toma cada día “al levantarme, al desayuno y a la cena”, estalló un debate mundial sobre la cantidad de vitaminas que se debe consumir y el riesgo de que tomadas en exceso pueden ser perjudiciales. La cantante, guitarrista, compositora y actriz estadounidense apareció con bolsas con más de 30 pastillas cada una. En Colombia, médicos especialistas coinciden en que el exceso en el consumo de vitaminas sintetizadas artificialmente puede ser peligroso y en que solo deben ingerirse bajo prescripción médica.
Las vitaminas naturales que contienen los alimentos y bebidas son vitales para la salud humana. En la siguiente entrevista, el médico cirujano Leonardo Palacio Sánchez define la realidad de cada una de las vitaminas que requiere el organismo y explica los mitos y errores de la creencia popular sobre el tema. ¿Qué podría producir? Sí. No. Taste-Testing An Incredibly Realistic Salt Replacement (That You've Been Eating All Along) For a week this past May, I used a new salt substitute called Salt for Life in all of my foods. I sprinkled it on soup and cooked dishes. I even tried a little bit without any accompanying food at all. It tasted slightly different from regular salt--a little sharper, somehow.
But I didn’t notice the difference at all when I cooked with the product. And in any case, I--along with everyone reading this--have probably eaten the salt replacement in processed foods without even knowing it. Salt for Life comes from Nu-Tek Salt, a Bill Gates-endorsed company that sells salt replacement products that contain 70% less sodium than traditional salt. "We have taken a logical path on how we have developed the technology and put it in the marketplace. That consumer-friendly product is Salt for Life, which will begin rolling out online and in grocery stores in August and September of this year. Nu-Tek’s secret sauce, says Mower, is what it calls "single crystal technology. " Zizek on living healthy. How long before we're eating 3D-printed food? In this article from Print Shift, our one-off magazine about additive manufacturing, Dezeen's Ben Hobson asks how soon we could be tucking into 3D-printed steaks.
The concept of 3D-printed food is hard to swallow, but technology that could revolutionise the way we cook is hotting up. In 2009, Philips Design presented a sci-fi vision of the future with a conceptual food printer that could produce a perfectly balanced meal at the touch of a few buttons. Part of a research project called Food Probe, which looked at how we might source and eat food in 15 to 20 years’ time, the imagined machine would allow our future selves to print out our ideal combinations of flavours and nutrients in an unlimited range of forms. It sounded too Star Trek to be true (as Dezeen readers were quick to point out when we originally ran the story).
Philips itself is not developing a 3D food printer, but companies around the world are starting to take the concept seriously. This printer is not a far-off fantasy. "Food is the next frontier of 3D printing" News: 3D printing expert Janne Kyttanen has produced prototype printed pasta, breakfast cereal and burgers to demonstrate how advances in 3D printing could transform the way we eat (+ interview + slideshow). Kyttanen, co-founder of design studio Freedom of Creation and creative director of printer manufacturer 3D Systems, told Dezeen: "Food is the next frontier.
We’re already printing in chocolate, so a lot of these things will be possible in the next few years. " To illustrate the possibilities, Kyttanen has 3D-printed models of pasta in plastic and cheese burgers in plaster. "I printed burgers just to create an iconic image and make people realise that one day we will be able to 3D-print a hamburger. And once you do, you don’t want to print a traditional hamburger; you can print the weirdest thing you can imagine.
" Kyttanen believes it's only a matter of time before technology enables us to print molecules in combinations that produce tasty meals. Photography is by Ivo de Bruijn. Janne Kyttanen. The 9 Most Terrifying Attempts to Improve Popular Foods. McDonald’s Closes All Their Restaurants in Bolivia. Try The First Recipe Devised By IBM's Supercomputer Chef.