Food
Posts related to chemicals in food, benefical, harmful benign
I’m grumpy now. Maybe it’s because I had a bagel for breakfast. Or maybe it’s because I just read an excerpt from a book that claims that eating a bagel can make one grumpy. The book is called “The Happiness Diet: A Nutritional Prescription for a Sharp Brain, Balanced Mood, and Lean, Energized Body.” What is that wondrous prescription? It seems simple enough. [To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Monday, February 06, 2012 10:34 PM |
If you wanted to find some “Chaga” mushroom you would tromp through a forest looking for a birch tree with an unusual growth on its trunk. Although it is classified as a mushroom, Chaga doesn’t look like one. Instead of having gills, this mushroom is permeated with numerous pores. Under pressure it crumbles readily, revealing a brownish inside with cream coloured veins. Why would anyone seek out this ugly parasite [To read more click on Title]
posted @ Sunday, January 29, 2012 10:32 PM |
Your grandmother, if you were lucky enough to have one, probably told you to eat your fruits and veggies. And now it seems that those grandmothers who meddled with our dietary habits and urged kids to eat their peas and carrots were bang on. Grandmas have been joined by a plethora of scientists who tell us that we should be eating anywhere between five and ten servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Grandmothers went by instinct, but science progresses through [To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Tuesday, October 18, 2011 10:45 PM |
Mention cranberry juice and “urinary tract infection” springs to mind. Most women and many men are familiar with the frequent urination and accompanying burning sensation that signals a bacterial invasion of the urinary tract. Today antibiotics solve the problem, but what did people do before? “Flushing the system” seemed a logical approach. All sorts of beverages were tried, but by the mid-1800s books on folkloric medicine were suggesting the use of cranberry juice[To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Monday, September 12, 2011 11:48 AM |
Don’t get scared just because you can’t pronounce it. If you like chocolate you’ve probably eaten it. Let me fill you in on the story. I think the first medicine I ever heard of was “Ricinus,” a liquidy concoction that came in a brown bottle. My mother would ply me with it when she suspected I was constipated. Although I can’t imagine why as a child I would have had such a problem since our diet in Hungary back then included generous doses of goose fat[To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Thursday, August 25, 2011 9:15 AM |
If you take a look at all the literature put out by the French wine industry, you'll start to wonder whether you should replace wine drinking by intravenous infusions of red wine. They make a case for wine being virtually a drug to prevent heart disease. They offer reams of scientific evidence about neutralizing free radicals and preventing cholesterol from damaging the walls of arteries. Of course, that doesn't prove that wine is responsible [To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Thursday, July 21, 2011 2:45 PM |
Walk into a health food store these days and chances are you won’t find much food. But you will find a bewildering array of dietary supplements, often shelved in alphabetical order. One of the first ones you’ll encounter is L-Arginine. The label won’t be very informative. It may say something like “dietary supplement,” or “conditionally essential amino acid,” or “support for healthy cardiovascular function” or “supports circulation.” However, [To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Sunday, April 03, 2011 11:15 PM |
For scientists and physicians, the Internet has been both a blessing and a curse. Journal articles are at our fingertips and information about virtually any subject is just a few keystrokes away. But not all of the available information is reliable. A frightening amount of pseudo-scientific drivel permeates the web and spreads like wildfire when attached to emails. Either we are warned about some nasty chemical that is unraveling the very fabric of society, or [To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Sunday, March 13, 2011 11:28 PM |
How many times have you watched kids bouncing of the wall at a birthday party and heard someone remark that it must be because of all the sugar they guzzled? Well, better look elsewhere for a culprit, because it isn't the sugar. Numerous scientific studies have investigated the effects of sugar on behavior and have concluded that it either has no effect, or that it has a mild sedative effect. So why are people still convinced that sugar causes hyperactivity [To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Sunday, February 06, 2011 10:25 PM |
I felt I had to write a response to the numerous emails I received after writing a science-based column on Chicken McNuggets. There were some 200 emails, attributable to the column making it onto Yahoo.ca. Some accused me of being paid by McDonalds, some suggested that I must have been paid by the health food industry to attack the company. Here is my response: I’m shocked. And that doesn’t happen easily. [To read more click on Title.]
posted @ Sunday, January 23, 2011 10:13 PM |
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