When You Eat May Be Just as Vital to Your Health as What You Eat

This is Christopher Vollmers in the lab at the Salk Institute. (Credit: Top Image: Courtesy of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies Bottom Image: Courtesy of Christopher Vollmers)

When you eat may be just as vital to your health as what you eat, found researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their experiments in mice revealed that the daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver — the body’s metabolic clearinghouse — is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body’s circadian clock as conventional wisdom had it.

“If feeding time determines the activity of a large number of genes completely independent of the circadian clock, when you eat and fast each day will have a huge impact on your metabolism,” says the study’s leader Satchidananda (Satchin) Panda, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory.

The Salk researchers’ findings, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why shift workers are unusually prone to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, high cholesterol levels and obesity.

“We believe that it is not shift work per se that wreaks havoc with the body’s metabolism but changing shifts and weekends, when workers switch back to a regular day-night cycle,” says Panda.

In mammals, the circadian timing system is composed of a central circadian clock in the brain and subsidiary oscillators in most peripheral tissues. The master clock in the brain is set by light and determines the overall diurnal or nocturnal preference of an animal, including sleep-wake cycles and feeding behavior. The clocks in peripheral organs are largely insensitive to changes in the light regime. Instead, their phase and amplitude are affected by many factors including feeding time.

The clocks themselves keep time through the fall and rise of gene activity on a roughly 24-hour schedule that anticipates environmental changes and adapts many of the body’s physiological function to the appropriate time of day.

“The liver oscillator in particular helps the organism to adapt to a daily pattern of food availability by temporally tuning the activity of thousands of genes regulating metabolism and physiology,” says Panda. “This regulation is very important, since the absence of a robust circadian clock predisposes the organism to various metabolic dysfunctions and diseases.”

Despite its importance, it wasn’t clear whether the circadian rhythms in hepatic transcription were solely controlled by the liver clock in anticipation of food or responded to actual food intake.

To investigate how much influence rhythmic food intake exerts over the hepatic circadian oscillator, graduate student and first author Christopher Vollmers put normal and clock-deficient mice on strictly controlled feeding and fasting schedules while monitoring gene expression across the whole genome.

He found that putting mice on a strict 8-hour feeding/16-hour fasting schedule restored the circadian transcription pattern of most metabolic genes in the liver of mice without a circadian clock. Conversely, during prolonged fasting, only a small subset of genes continued to be transcribed in a circadian pattern even with a functional circadian clock present.

“Food-induced transcription functions like a metabolic sand timer that runs for 24 hours and is continually reset by the feeding schedule while the central circadian clock is driven by self-sustaining rhythms that help us anticipate food, based on our usual eating schedule,” says Vollmers. “But in the real world we don’t eat at the same time every day and it makes perfect sense to increase the activity of metabolic genes when you need them the most.”

For example, genes that encode enzymes needed to break down sugars rise immediately after a meal, while the activity of genes encoding enzymes needed to break down fat is highest when we fast. Consequently a clearly defined daily feeding schedule puts the enzymes of metabolism in shift work and optimizes burning of sugar and fat.

“Our study represents a seminal shift in how we think about circadian cycles,” says Panda. “The circadian clock is no longer the sole driver of rhythms in gene function, instead the phase and amplitude of rhythmic gene function in the liver is determined by feeding and fasting periods — the more defined they are, the more robust the oscillations become.”

While the importance of robust metabolic rhythms for our health has been demonstrated by shift workers’ increased risk of developing metabolic syndrome, the underlying molecular reasons are still unclear. Panda speculates that the oscillations serve one big purpose: to separate incompatible processes, such as the generation of DNA-damaging reactive oxygen species and DNA replication.

Panda, for one, has stopped eating between 8 pm and 8 am and says he feels great. “I even lost weight, although I eat whatever I want during the day,” he says.

Researchers who also contributed the work include postdoctoral researcher Luciano DiTacchio, Ph.D., graduate students Sandhyarani Pulivarthy and Shubhrox Gill, as well as research assistant Hiep Le, all in the Regulatory Biology Laboratory.

The work was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and the Pew Scholars Program in Biomedical Sciences.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Salk Institute.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091125094321.htm

Movie Popcorn Has Shocking Amount Of Calories Fat In It

CBS reports on a study by the Center for Science and Public Interest that analyzed nutritional makeup iof movie popcorn; the results are eye-opening. Consuming a medium size popcorn and soda is the equivalent of eating three Quarter Pounders from McDonald’s, along with 12 pats of butter.

The caloric and fat content of this theater staple will have you thinking twice before you order:

the concessions from Regal, the country’s biggest movie chain, have 1,160 calories and three days worth – 60 grams – of fat. Regal said that the medium popcorn had 720 calories and the large had 960, but CSPI’s tests found those numbers to be understated. A small popcorn at Regal had 670 calories – the same as a Pizza Hut Personal Pepperoni Pan Pizza. Even if you share a small popcorn – it’s still about a day’s worth of saturated fat per person, according to CSPI.

In related news, a study sponsored by the United Health Foundation, Partnership for Prevention, and American Public Health Association found that 40 percent of the U.S. will be obese by 2018: “the states most in danger of a ballooning obesity epidemic are: Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Dakota.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/18/movie-popcorn-has-shockin_n_361931.html

Turning Desert into a Garden/Food Forest

Written by Zachary Shahan

About two kilometers from the Dead Sea and two from where Jesus was christened, in the country of Jordan, Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute and his crew created a near miracle turning desert into a lush permaculture garden.

In August in this location, Lawton says that temperatures could rise above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). People farming there were farming under plastic strips and using tons of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers. The idea to grow a lush forest or garden of edible plants would probably make people laugh or roll their eyes. Nonetheless, the permaculture crew had exactly this vision in mind and a little funding to help them to do it.

Lawton and his group were given about 10 acres of extremely salty and flat soil 400 meters below sea level. They designed a system to collect as much of the rainwater as possible into swales (”water-harvesting ditches on contour”), bordered the swales with mulch and, on the uphill side, nitrogen-fixing trees that helped to shade the water and prevent evaporation. Underneath the mulch, they put mini-irrigation systems. On the downhill side, they planted fruit trees — date palms, fig trees, pomegranate trees, guava trees, mulberry trees, and some citrus — mixed in with non-fruit trees and more mulch (very non-traditional agriculture).

Within four months, they had figs growing. Local agriculture experts had told them that figs could not grow there, so when the figs started growing they invited these local experts to come determine if they had de-salted the soil or if they were growing things in salty soil which “could not” grow in salty soil. They found the salt levels were dropping, but could not determine why, initially (watch the video to see why, exactly, the soil was “de-salted” — at about minute 6:00).

In December, the locals were shocked to find mushrooms growing underneath the mulch, something they had never seen due to the extreme dryness in the area. The ecosystem itself had created deep, extremely fertile soil, an amazing feat there!

The project ran out of its main funding source (due to the nature of the funding) but even without the money, the place is now “developing itself” and producing more and more on its own. It essentially just relies on the area’s small amount of rainfall now.

As a result of this project (on the most horrible land for such a project), Lawton concludes that they could re-green the Middle-East or any desert. A garden could be grown in the driest, saltiest soil. Deserts thought to be ruined by grazing, deforestation, harmful agriculture, or nearly anything else, could be re-greened with permaculture practices.

This is an amazing discovery based on simple, but well-thought out design. The methods could help solve problems in countless places. Permaculture, if ever spread to the broader world, could bring relief to millions (or more) people.

Image Credit 1 & 2: Geoff Lawton (Jamal Al Deen)

Follow Link for Video – http://ecoworldly.com/2009/11/14/turning-desert-into-a-garden/

Growing Skyscrapers: The Rise of Vertical Farms (This time from Scientific American)

Growing crops in city skyscrapers would use less water and fossil fuel than outdoor farming, eliminate agricultural runoff and provide fresh food

By Dickson Despommier

Key Concepts

• Farming is ruining the environment, and not enough arable land remains to feed a projected 9.5 billion people by 2050.
• Growing food in glass high-rises could drastically reduce fossil-fuel emissions and recycle city wastewater that now pollutes waterways.
• A one-square-block farm 30 stories high could yield as much food as 2,400 outdoor acres, with less subsequent spoilage.
• Existing hydroponic greenhouses provide a basis for prototype vertical farms now being considered by urban planners in cities worldwide.

Together the world’s 6.8 billion people use land equal in size to South America to grow food and raise livestock—an astounding agricultural footprint. And demographers predict the planet will host 9.5 billion people by 2050. Because each of us requires a minimum of 1,500 calories a day, civilization will have to cultivate another Brazil’s worth of land—2.1 billion acres—if farming continues to be practiced as it is today. That much new, arable earth simply does not exist. To quote the great American humorist Mark Twain: “Buy land. They’re not making it any more.”

Agriculture also uses 70 percent of the world’s available freshwater for irrigation, rendering it unusable for drinking as a result of contamination with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and silt. If current trends continue, safe drinking water will be impossible to come by in certain densely populated regions. Farming involves huge quantities of fossil fuels, too—20 percent of all the gasoline and diesel fuel consumed in the U.S. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are of course a major concern, but so is the price of food as it becomes linked to the price of fuel, a mechanism that roughly doubled the cost of eating in most places worldwide between 2005 and 2008.

Some agronomists believe that the solution lies in even more intensive industrial farming, carried out by an ever decreasing number of highly mechanized farming consortia that grow crops having higher yields—a result of genetic modification and more powerful agrochemicals. Even if this solution were to be implemented, it is a short-term remedy at best, because the rapid shift in climate continues to rearrange the agricultural landscape, foiling even the most sophisticated strategies. Shortly after the Obama administration took office, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu warned the public that climate change could wipe out farming in California by the end of the century.

What is more, if we continue wholesale deforestation just to generate new farmland, global warming will accelerate at an even more catastrophic rate. And far greater volumes of agricultural runoff could well create enough aquatic “dead zones” to turn most estuaries and even parts of the oceans into barren wastelands.

As if all that were not enough to worry about, foodborne illnesses account for a significant number of deaths worldwide—salmonella, cholera, Escherichia coli and shigella, to name just a few. Even more of a problem are life-threatening parasitic infections, such as malaria and schistosomiasis. Furthermore, the common practice of using human feces as a fertilizer in most of Southeast Asia, many parts of Africa, and Central and South America (commercial fertilizers are too expensive) facilitates the spread of parasitic worm infections that afflict 2.5 billion people.

Clearly, radical change is needed. One strategic shift would do away with almost every ill just noted: grow crops indoors, under rigorously controlled conditions, in vertical farms. Plants grown in high-rise buildings erected on now vacant city lots and in large, multistory rooftop greenhouses could produce food year-round using significantly less water, producing little waste, with less risk of infectious diseases, and no need for fossil-fueled machinery or trans­port from distant rural farms. Vertical farming could revolutionize how we feed ourselves and the rising population to come. Our meals would taste better, too; “locally grown” would become the norm.

The working description I am about to explain might sound outrageous at first. But engineers, urban planners and agronomists who have scrutinized the necessary technologies are convinced that vertical farming is not only feasible but should be tried.

Do No Harm
Growing our food on land that used to be intact forests and prairies is killing the planet, setting up the processes of our own extinction. The minimum requirement should be a variation of the physician’s credo: “Do no harm.” In this case, do no further harm to the earth. Humans have risen to conquer impossible odds before. From Charles Darwin’s time in the mid-1800s and forward, with each Malthusian prediction of the end of the world because of a growing population came a series of technological breakthroughs that bailed us out. Farming machines of all kinds, improved fertilizers and pesticides, plants artificially bred for greater productivity and disease resistance, plus vaccines and drugs for common animal diseases all resulted in more food than the rising population needed to stay alive.

Article Continues – http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-rise-of-vertical-farms

Scientists Develop Rot-Proof Apple that Stays Fresh for 4 Months

Photo credit: Abhijit Tembhekar via Flickr

by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA

Scientists in Australia have developed an apple that won’t rot. Or, won’t rot for a long, long time. The delicious-sounding RS103-130 apple is a rare cross-breed 20 years in the making, cooked up by researchers at Australia’s Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries. They claim the shiny red apples will stay fresh, delicious, and crispy for four months. But, wait; aren’t things like apples supposed to rot?

Image credit: ALAMY

RS103-130 apple: Tastes better than it sounds, apparently
The idea isn’t so much to make it rot-proof, necessarily, but to just make it last longer that it ordinarily would. The team developing it did so by incorporating a gene from a black-spot resistant Asiatic apple, and they swear by the taste. Tim Mulherin, Queensland’s primary industries minister, says, “Initial taste tests have been outstanding. Out of the five apple types tasted, the new variety scored the highest.”

The team is also excited about other perceived benefits that the apple brings to the table. Because it’s resistant to disease, it will cut down on fungicides and pesticides used by conventional growers, saving farmers money on the preventative sprays, and reducing pesticide load.

It will also make apple storage more energy efficient, they say. Cold storage refrigeration, like most forms of refrigeration, uses lots of energy; Guy Barter, chief horticultural adviser for the Royal Horticultural Society, notes that, “if you had a variety that required less cold storing, that would be valuable.”

Should we be eating lab-designed foods?
Okay, so all of this sounds nice, but, really, why is this necessary? Lab-designed food issues aside — like, do you want to put something that doesn’t rot forever in your body? — if we all just followed green eating guidelines and ate seasonal, local, organic apples, there would be no need for something like this (and who’s to say there is a need now, anyway?).

Food is supposed to rot, and while way too much food is wasted around the world, the solution is not to engineer perishables to last longer; the solution is to create stronger local food systems that emphasize sustainable production and seasonal cycles. So, with all due respect to the RS103-130, we’ll be sticking with the good old-fashioned Macintosh, Fuji, and other nature-designed apples. Meanwhile, the Queensland government is seeking a commercial supply partner to distribute the fruit and hopes to begin selling it next year.

Read more from The Independent and New York Daily News.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/scientists-develop-rot-proof-apple-stays-fresh-four-months.php

Friendly Aquaponics: Commercial and Home-Scale Fish and Vegetable Production

Image credit: Friendly Aquaponics

by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA

It always appeals to me when I see a business that lists, as one of its goals, to “put ourselves out of business as soon as we can” by spreading its knowledge as freely as generously as possible—especially when Leonard Nimoy is quoted as inspiration. But I suspect Friendly Aquaponics in Hawaii will be in business for some time to come. And that’s no bad thing. If their website is anything to go by, their aquaponics system is one of the most impressive I’ve seen.

From the Urban Aquaponics of Will Allen’s Growing Power to the ready-to-use aquaponics kits of Aquaponics USA, the idea of combining hydroponics and aquaculture in a mutually beneficial system is appealing from an efficiency standpoint. And while some have argued that aquaponics is cruel, it’s certainly no more cruel than any other type of aquaculture.

Despite being relative newcomers to the field, and despite “a long history of killing houseplants”, Susanne Friend and Tim Mann of Friendly Aquaponics seem to have their system down. Having decided in 2007 that the construction industry was no longer for them, the couple attended an aquaponics course at the University of the Virgin Islands. They now run their own commercial aquaponics system which they claim produced $5000 worth of produce and fish per month. The couple is also running a smaller off-grid system, ideal for family use. They are growing lettuce, two types of tillapia, prawns, cut flowers and taro—a root and leaf crop traditionally grown by Pacific Islanders.

The couple are also running trainings, offering consultancy, and selling their copyrighted plans for commercial and domestic aquaponics systems online. Their plans don’t come cheap—but by the looks of things they’ve invested a lot of fime and effort into making them work.

Great to see yet another entrepreneurial outfit pushing aquaponics forward. Whether they’ll ever put themselves out of business remains to be seen.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/friendly-aquaponics.php

High Fructose Corn Syrup: A Recipe For Hypertension, Study Finds

A diet high in fructose increases the risk of developing high blood pressure (hypertension), according to new research. The findings suggest that cutting back on processed foods and beverages that contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) may help prevent hypertension. (Credit: iStockphoto/Travis Manley)

A diet high in fructose increases the risk of developing high blood pressure (hypertension), according to a paper being presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in San Diego, California. The findings suggest that cutting back on processed foods and beverages that contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) may help prevent hypertension.

Over the last 200 years, the rate of fructose intake has directly paralleled the increasing rate of obesity, which has increased sharply in the last 20 years since the introduction of HFCS. Today, Americans consume 30% more fructose than 20 years ago and up to four times more than 100 years ago, when obesity rates were less than 5%. While this increase mirrors the dramatic rise in the prevalence of hypertension, studies have been inconsistent in linking excess fructose in the diet to hypertension.

Diana Jalal, MD (University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center), and her colleagues studied the issue in a large representative population of US adults. They examined 4,528 adults 18 years of age or older with no prior history of hypertension. Fructose intake was calculated based on a dietary questionnaire, and foods such as fruit juices, soft drinks, bakery products, and candy were included. Dr. Jalal’s team found that people who ate or drank more than 74 grams per day of fructose (2.5 sugary soft drinks per day) increased their risk of developing hypertension. Specifically, a diet of more than 74 grams per day of fructose led to a 28%, 36%, and 87% higher risk for blood pressure levels of 135/85, 140/90, and 160/100 mmHg, respectively. (A normal blood pressure reading is below 120/80 mmHg.)

“These results indicate that high fructose intake in the form of added sugars is significantly and independently associated with higher blood pressure levels in the US adult population with no previous history of hypertension,” the authors concluded. Additional studies are needed to see if low fructose diets can normalize blood pressure and prevent the development of hypertension.

Study co-authors include Richard Johnson, MD, Gerard Smits, PhD, and Michel Chonchol, MD (University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center). Dr. Richard Johnson reports a conflict of interest as the author of “The Sugar Fix.” The authors report no other financial disclosures.

The study abstract, “Increased Fructose Intake is Independently Associated with Elevated Blood Pressure. Findings from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2003-2006),” (TH-FC037) was presented as part of a Free Communications Session during the American Society of Nephrology’s 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition on Oct. 29 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA.

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Adapted from materials provided by American Society of Nephrology, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091029211521.htm

Cinderella fruit: Wild delicacies become cash crops

by Charlie Pye-Smith

IF YOU had come here 10 years ago, says Thaddeus Salah as he shows us round his tree nursery in north-west Cameroon, you would have seen real hunger and poverty. “In those times,” he says, “we didn’t have enough chop to eat.” It wasn’t just food – “chop” in the local dialect – that his family lacked. They couldn’t afford school fees, healthcare or even chairs for their dilapidated grass-thatch house.

Salah’s fortunes changed in 2000 when he and his neighbours learned how to identify the best wild fruit trees and propagate them in a nursery. “Domesticating wild fruit like bush mango has changed our lives,” he says. His family now has “plenty chop”, as he puts it. He is also earning enough from the sale of indigenous fruit trees to pay school fees for four of his children. He has been able to re-roof his house with zinc sheets and buy goods he could only dream of owning before. He even has a mobile phone.

From Salah’s farm we gaze across the intensively cultivated hills which roll away towards the Nigerian border. “Ten years ago, you’d hardly see any safou [African plum, Dacryodes edulis] in this area,” says Zachary Tchoundjeu, a botanist at the World Agroforestry Centre’s regional office in the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé. “Now you see them growing everywhere.”

The spread of African plum through these hills is one small part of a bigger movement that could change the lives of millions of Africans. The continent is home to some 3000 species of wild fruit tree, many of which are ripe for domestication. Chocolate berries, gingerbread plums, monkey oranges, gumvines, tree grapes and a host of others could soon play a role in ensuring dependable food supplies in areas now plagued by malnutrition (see “Future fruits of the forest”).

One of the architects of the programme is Roger Leakey, a former director of research at the World Agroforestry Centre. He calls these fruit trees “Cinderella species”: their attributes may have gone unrecognised by science and big business, but the time has come for them to step into the limelight.

“The last great round of crop domestication took place during the green revolution [in the mid-20th century], which developed high-yielding varieties of starchy staples such as rice, maize and wheat,” says Leakey. “This new round could scarcely be more different.” Sparsely funded and largely ignored by agribusiness, high-tech labs and policy-makers, it is a peasant revolution taking place in the fields of Africa’s smallholders.

The revolution has its roots in the mid-1990s, when researchers from the World Agroforestry Centre conducted a series of surveys in west Africa, southern Africa and the Sahel to establish which indigenous trees were most valued by local people. “We were startled by the results,” says Tchoundjeu. “We were expecting people to point to commercially important timber species, but what they valued most were indigenous fruit trees.”

In response to this unexpected finding, the World Agroforestry Centre launched a fruit tree domestication programme in 1998. It began by focusing on a handful of species, including bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis), an indigenous African species unrelated to the Indian mango, African plum – not actually a plum but a savoury, avocado-like fruit sometimes called an afrocado – and a nut tree known locally as njansan (Ricinodendron heudelotii). Though common in the forests and as wild trees on farms, they were almost unknown to science. “We knew their biological names, but that was about all,” says Ebenezar Asaah, a tree specialist at the World Agroforestry Centre. “We had no idea how long it took for them to reach maturity and produce fruit, and we knew nothing about their reproductive behaviour.” Local people, in contrast, knew a good deal about them, as the trees’ fruits have long been part of their diet.

Rural Africans consume an enormous variety of wild foodstuffs. In Cameroon, fruits and seeds from around 300 indigenous trees are eaten, according to a study by researchers at Cameroon’s University of Dschang. A similar survey in Malawi and Zambia found that up to 40 per cent of rural households rely on indigenous fruits to sustain them during the “hungry months”, particularly January and February, when supplies in their granaries are exhausted and they are waiting for their next harvest (Acta Horticulturae, vol 632, p 15).

Some of these so called “famine foods” have already been domesticated by accident, says ethnoecologist Anthony Cunningham of People and Plants International, an NGO based in Essex Junction, Vermont. He cites the example of marula (Sclerocarya birrea), a southern African tree in the cashew family with edible nutty seeds encased in a tart, turpentine-flavoured fruit. “Long before the development of agricultural crops, hunter-gatherers were eating marula fruit,” he says. “They’d pick the best fruit, then scatter the seeds around their camps.” These would eventually germinate and mature into fruit-bearing trees, ensuring, in evolutionary terms, the survival of the tastiest. Marula is now fully domesticated and the fruit is used to make juice, a liqueur called Amarula Cream and cosmetic oils.

Article Continues - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427331.200-cinderella-fruit-wild-delicacies-become-cash-crops.html

Ice Cream Researchers Making Sweet Strides With ‘Functional Foods’

Laura Ortinau (left), a graduate student in food sciences at the University of Missouri helps Rick Linhardt, coordinator of research operations and manager of Buck’s Ice Cream store, and Jessica Roland, a junior in food science and nutrition, make a batch of Tiger Stripe Ice Cream. MU researchers are working on ways to make ice cream not only tastier, but healthier as well. (Credit: Pinar Istek/University of Missouri)

A comfort food, a tasty treat, an indulgence — ice cream conjures feelings of happiness and satisfaction for millions. Ice cream researchers at the University of Missouri have discovered ways to make ice cream tastier and healthier and have contributed to ice cream development and manufacturing for more than a century. Today, MU researchers are working to make ice cream into a functional food, adding nutrients such as fiber, antioxidants and pro-biotics to premium ice cream.

“The idea of putting a functional ingredient into a food instead of just using the nutrients found in the food naturally takes a multi-functional approach,” said Ingolf Gruen, MU professor of food chemistry and ice cream researcher in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. “Food provides calories and comfort — people want to indulge. We’re working on making ice cream satisfying and healthy.”

Adding nutrients such as pro-biotics, which are already found in some dairy products, and fiber to ice cream can improve digestive health. Many diseases are caused by inflammation that starts in the intestines, Gruen said. Improving digestive health with functional foods might reduce that inflammation. Although functional foods have health benefits, there are many challenges to adding nutrients to ice cream.

“Our major challenges are texture, flavor and psychological acceptance,” Gruen said. “The nutrients we add often have bitter tastes and affect the texture of ice cream that we have to mask. Flavors like chocolate are easier to work with because the flavor is so strong that it can overcome other flavors from the nutrients. Another challenge is determining whether people would be upset that we’re ‘tampering’ with a comfort food. We need to know if they would be more willing to pay for ice cream with added nutritional benefits.”

Gruen and his research team are looking at using the açai berry and remnants from grapes in wine-making to add nutrients to ice cream. They hope to have a prototype ready for tasting in the next six months.

This new research on ice cream as a functional food coincides with the 20th anniversary of Buck’s Ice Cream Parlor, an ice cream shop and research facility at MU. In 1989, Wendall and Ruth Arbuckle contributed about $160,000 to ice cream research at MU and were the namesake for Buck’s Ice Cream Parlor, previously Eckles Hall Ice Cream Shop from the 1920s to 1972. Buck’s might be best known for the invention of Tiger Stripe ice cream, a popular MU frozen treat made with French Vanilla ice cream and dark chocolate stripes, that is sent to people around the world.

MU has a long history of ice cream research that dates back to the 1920s. William Henry Eddie Reid, professor emeritus of dairy manufacturing, and graduate student Wendell Arbuckle, started the program by studying the texture of ice cream. In the 1960s, Robert Marshall, professor emeritus of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition, began studying ways to make ice cream meet the nutritional needs of consumers. This work led to pioneering research of low-fat ice cream. Researchers found that replacing milk fat with ingredients made from carbohydrates and proteins created low-fat frozen desserts that were similar to high-fat desserts. The ice cream industry adapted those formulas to produce the ice cream consumed today.

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Adapted from materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091109194745.htm

Your Own Personal Vertical Farm from Philips

Philips Design

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto

We love vertical farms on TreeHugger, but some question whether they make any sense. But perhaps if they were downsized and brought into our homes they might be just what we need. “This Biophere home farm contains fish, crustaceans, algae, plants and other mini-ecosystems, all interdependent and in balance with each other.”

Clive van Heerden, Senior Director of design-led innovation at Philips Design says in a press release:

“People are increasingly concerned about how their food has been manipulated and processed, genetic modification, global shortages, environmental degradation through monoculture, the distance food travels before reaching their plates and many other related issues,” says van Heerden. “One way of addressing such legitimate concerns is to source the food yourself by having a biosphere in your living room.”

Via Inhabitat and Designboom

More vertical farms:
Vertical (Diagonal?) Farm from Work AC in NYC
Vertical Farm in Dubai Uses Seawater

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/vertical-farm-philips.php