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"Want
to end obesity?" asks Philip James of the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine and President of the International Study for the
Study of Obesity. "Then talk to the ministries of finance, not health.
The impact of health education is zero."
Christopher Wanjek of LiveScience's Bad Medicine writes about a meeting of nutrition experts in Rio de Janeiro on how to end the rising global obesity:
The culprit is "ultraprocessed" food, which are nutrient-poor and calorie-rich, and some experts believe that the cure is government regulation: Link (Photo: Shutterstock)The food industry is making us fat, according to James, and efforts to educate the public on proper nutrition or to ask industry to voluntarily reduce unhealthy ingredients such as sugar, salt, fat and myriad additives is "a load of diverting, delaying rubbish," he said. Government-initiated economic policies are needed to make healthy food affordable.
John Pemberton earned a medical degree when he was only 19 years old -and then worked as a pharmacist, trying to invent new drugs. He particularly needed a new kind of pain relief, as he was badly wounded in the Civiil war and had become addicted to morphine for relief.
After the war, Pemberton settled in Atlanta, where he began work on a beverage combining coca leaves and cola nuts. His objective was to create a pain reliever but when his lab assistant accidentally mixed the concoction with carbonated water on May 8, 1886, the two men tasted it, liked it, and decided it might make a profitable alternative to ginger ale and root beer.
Pemberton sold the rights to Coca-Cola (twice, actually, but that’s another story) as his behavior became more erratic. He died only two years after his accidental invention and only a few months after the Coca Cola Corporation was incorporated.
The Coca-Cola that you may be drinking right now has been reformulated a bit over the years, but the basic beverage is 126 years old today. Link
Photo: Susan Erdman
Put down that Viagra and reach out for some yogurt instead. New studies by Eric Alm and Susan Erdman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that yogurt not only make mice slimmer, it makes them sexier as well.
“Maybe it has to do with the healthy bacteria that live in our guts,” said Alm, an evolutionary biologist, explaining how there are 10 times more bacteria in the body than human cells. “Maybe probiotics in the yogurt have something to do with the effects on weight.”
To test the theory, Alm and Erdman fed one group of mice a normal mouse diet and another group the same diet with a mouse-sized serving of vanilla yogurt.
“One of the first things we noticed was their fur coat,” said Erdman, assistant director of comparative medicine at MIT. “It was so thick and shiny; shockingly shiny.”
But shiny fur wasn’t the only thing that set the yogurt-eating mice apart from their siblings: They were also slimmer, and the males had “swagger.”
And what causes this newfound sexual confidence?
“She noticed their testicles were protruding out really far,” Erdman said.
Swaggerin', yogurt-eatin', slim mice with a sexy strut and huge testicles. Yogurt, what can't it do? Link
BRB, going to the market to get me some yogurt!
Tom Scocca is upset with celebrity chefs and recipes that tell you to caramelize onions in ten minutes. You can sauté onions in *ten minutes, but caramelization takes around 45 minutes, meaning “the best time to caramelize onions is yesterday.”
Here, telling the truth about how to prepare onions for French onion soup, is Julia Child: “[C]ook slowly until tender and translucent, about 10 minutes. Blend in the salt and sugar, raise heat to moderately high, and let the onions brown, stirring frequently until they are a dark walnut color, 25 to 30 minutes.” Ten minutes plus 25 to 30 minutes equals 35 to 40 minutes. That is how long it takes to caramelize onions.
But if you take the time to do it right, you’ll be rewarded with some mighty delicious cooked onions. The article at Slate looks into how chefs come up with their timetables, which are different from what goes on in your kitchen. Link -via Metafilter, where you can find a lengthy but helpful discussion on onions.
(Image credit: Flickr user Esteban Cavrico)
*Actually less than ten minutes, but the linked article is only about caramelization.
Succulents might sound delicious, but the idea of eating a cactus reletive right out of the planter just doesn’t seem that appetizing…unless it’s a tasty cupcake like this one.
What?
If you think that a waffle iron is only good for ... well, you know, waffles,
then this is the article for you!
When Chowhound forum user thunderbug84 asked if there are any alternative uses for a waffle iron, the editors of the site were inspired to investigate:
As we researched, we found people who brew beer in coffee makers or cook fish in the dishwasher, but not every experiment was worth the time or effort. We came up with the following parameters: (1) the food should taste as good or better than when made in the conventional manner, (2) the cooking time should be equal to or shorter than normal, and (3) the method should use the appliance in a way that’s totally different from what it’s known for.
Imagine our delight at seeing a soufflé rise up in the slow cooker, a frozen mixed drink take shape in the ice cream maker. Our late-night snack cravings found succor with a waffle iron. And if you don’t have these appliances, or don’t understand why anyone would veer from the standard, there are conventional instructions for most of the recipes too.
Scientists are concerned about spilled coffee, because long hours of research require coffee, and a spill can ruin your train of thought, if not your valuable notes. Mechanical engineer Rouslan Krechetnikov of the the University of California, Santa Barbara, and graduate student Hans Mayer did some experiments after noticing coffee being sloshed at a fluid dynamics conference (of all places).
Back at the lab, Krechetnikov and Mayer set up an experiment: They asked a person to walk at different speeds along a straight path with a filled coffee mug in hand. The volunteer did this in one of two ways-either focusing on the coffee mug, or looking straight ahead. A camera recorded the person’s motion and the mug’s trajectory, while a tiny sensor on the mug recorded the instant of spillage.
A fluid’s back-and-forth movement has a certain natural frequency, and this is determined by the size of its container. In their paper published last week in Physical Review E, Krechetnikov and Mayer show that everyday mug sizes produce natural frequencies that just happen to match those of a person’s leg movements during walking. This means that walking alone, without any other interference, is tuned to drive coffee to oscillate in a mug. But the researchers also found that even small irregularities in a person’s walking are important: These amplify the wilder oscillations, or sloshing, which bumps up the chance of a spillage.
“This is a very cool study,” says Lei Ren, a specialist in the biomechanics of walking at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. “It reveals the sophisticated interplay between human body dynamics and the fluid mechanics of spilling coffee.”
Their advice? Don’t walk too fast while carrying coffee, don’t fill the cup to the brim, and watch what you’re doing. There’s more, which you can read at Science Now. Link -via reddit
(Image credit: H.C. Mayer and R. Krechetnikov)
Fair food and cake pops are nice, but sometimes you want food-on-a-stick that’s neither fried nor sugary. Michael Procopio at Food for the Thoughtless gives us the complete recipe for pimento cheese balls on sticks, and also a introduction about pimento cheese in general. Believe it or not, I never realized it was a Southern thing. I thought every American grew up around pimento cheese! Link -via Laughing Squid
Heather Sitarzewski decided one day that she wanted to try making her son a bento box for his school lunch every day for the next year. After getting her bearings, she started to create some wonderful and amazing designs that she would then go on to post on her Facebook. Soon enough a Tumblr ensued and now you can enjoy her great artworks on a regular basis. Let’s just hope she doesn’t stop at the end of this school year.
Link Via BoingBoing
Is it just me or does Winterfell somehow seem like it would be tastier than Heineken? And, of course, Night’s Watch would certainly be better than MGD because, well, anything is better than Miller. But I guess I’m a bit of a beer snob.
Link Via Geekologie
Mona Lisa has never looked so delicious! Kristen Cumings recreated Da Vinci's masterpiece in the unlikeliest of medium: Jelly Belly jelly beans.
A few years ago, Jelly Belly officially hired painter and illustrator Kristen Cumings to produce several works of art to add to their collection entitled Jelly Belly Masterpieces of Confectionary Art. The California-based painter takes about 50-60 hours to complete the life-size paintings made of approximately 9,000 to 12,000 jelly beans each. The enormous 4 x 6 feet murals each depict a classic work of art, from Vincent can Gogh's The Starry Night to Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.
The artist's process involves spray adhesives to initially stick the beans to the canvas and then coating the finished product in acrylic for protection.
My Modern Met has more examples of Kristen's jelly bean art: Link | More at Kristen's website
Kegerators are cool, but for many, they’re just a bit too frat-house-ish. For those that need to nerd up their kegerators, this Android version is a perfect way to accessorize your beer drinking habits. It even uses a tablet to scan drinker’s badges so you can ensure no minors are getting drunk and that no one is going too crazy.
Link Via Geekosystem
Pssshh…using your iPhone to call, text and surf the web is so 2011. The real hip iPhone users are eating theirs…or at least the hip people in China who are able to get their hands on the iPhone 5 popsicle. Oddly, while there are mango and pear flavored options, there’s no apple flavor.
After
receiving bad service at La Fisherman restaurant in West Houston, Texas,
a family refused to pay the tip.
So what did the restaurant do? They locked the door ... and called the cops!
When the bill came, Marks said there was a problem. The restaurant added an automatic 17 percent gratuity because their party had more than five people in it, but Marks didn't feel like the staff earned the full tip so she asked to speak to a manager.
"We asked her, could the gratuity be removed? Could we give our own tip? She said it was part of their policy and there was nothing she could do about," Marks said. "If you're not satisfied with the service, you shouldn't have to pay gratuity."
The gratuity policy was clearly marked on the restaurant's menus. But Marks said when they questioned it the workers wouldn't let her or her friends leave; she claims they locked the door and called the police.
Is it fair to enforce an automatic tip policy (on large parties) if the service is less than stellar?
Previously on Neatorama: One Third of Waiters Consciously Provide Poor Service to Black Customers
John Spevacek is a chemical engineer with a confession to make. You may have noticed that snack bags are more difficult to open than they were years ago. Spevacek comes clean and takes the blame. Here’s how the project came about.
I was in the Packaging Films Group, making multilayer polypropylene films for food packaging. The film had a heat-seal adhesive on one side of the polypropylene base. One of our larger clients used our films to make potato chip bags. The problem they had with our existing films was that the they seal was too weak. The client’s chip-making plants were located west of the Rocky Mountains, so when trucks would drive their chips out to California, some of the seals would open up due to the pressure difference between the high altitude air and the air sealed inside the bag. And so they needed a stronger seal from us, which was then passed down to me.
So really, Spevacek is not so much to blame as the altitude of the Rocky Mountains! He goes on to describe the process of making bags and packing chips and how the new kind of seal was attained. Chip-lovers should read this, then forgive him. Link -via Gizmodo
(Image credit: Flickr user Like_the_Grand_Canyon)
Jones Soda has made quite a name for itself by selling flavors like turkey and bacon, and a new company now seems to be following in their footsteps.The best thing about Lester’s Fixins is that they seem to offer these odd flavors -like sweet corn, buffalo wings and peanut butter and jelly- all year round!
Link Via Laughing Squid, Image Via Blazenhoff [Flickr]
Stéphane Bureaux’s candle is not wax, but chocolate. Place it in the center of the cake and light it. In a few minutes, you’ll have a pool of hot chocolate syrup contained by only a wall of chocolate cake. You can figure out the next step.
Link -via Tasteologie
Sonia of The Healthy Foodie has a great party idea. This eye-catching pineapple is actually a mound of cream cheese mix covered with pecans and topped with the shoots of a pineapple.
Link -via Becky Fredrickson
Dumpster
diving, or "urban foraging" for you hipsters, has taken somewhat
of an aura of eco-activism and frugality here in the United States, but
it's often a matter of life and death in other countries.
Take, for instance, what the poor in the slums of the Philippines have to do to eat:
Felipa Fabon waits outside a local fried chicken restaurant in Manila. Crouching near to feral cats and rubbish bins, she isn't there to meet friends for dinner but to search through the diner's trash bags.
"I'm sorting the garbage, looking for 'pagpag'," she says. In Tagalog "pagpag" means the dust you shake off your clothing or carpet, but in Fabon's poverty- stricken world, it means chicken pulled from the trash. Pagpag is the product of a hidden food system for the urban poor that exists on the leftovers of the city's middle class.
Fabon is the merchant and pays the trash dealer just over a dollar for tonight's supply of garbage and scraps. In the dim haze of the street lights, she holds up a half-eaten chicken breast.
"This one, this is meat," she says. "Now what we do at home is clean it, put it in plastic, and then I sell it in the morning. It's very easy to sell because it's very cheap. People in my neighborhood want very cheap food."
"If it's mostly bones, it's 20 pesos ($0.05) per bag," she says.
Kyung Lah of CNN's Eye On has the report: Link
This is what happens when you eat with a cat sitting on your lap. It’s just TOO tempting for him! -via Buzzfeed
But then, a cat doesn’t have to be on your lap to be obnoxious while you’re eating. I found that out while trying to enjoy a bowl of cereal at my desk:
I know there are plenty of Sriracha lovers out there and even I am partial to a squirt in my pho and a dribble in my taco meat, but a whole lollipop that tastes just like hot sauce, I think I’ll pass. What about you guys? Are Sriracha pops a go or a no-go?
Link Via Geekosystem
This candy covered Huffy bike by Britta Hope looks like a dream come true for a sugarholic like me!
It’s a good thing there’s a real bike under all that candy, because I’d probably end up eating an entire wheel, or taking a big old bite out of the frame and then I’d end up without a set of wheels.
Britta clearly understands the needs of those of us with an insatiable appetite for sweets, since she intended the bike to be a cupcake delivery vehicle. Why don’t we have those in real life?!
Link –via DesignTAXI
Aurora Cakes in Burghead, UK made cake pops that closely resemble Doctor Who characters.
Back row, left to right: Clockwork Man, an Ood, the TARDIS, and a Cyberman.
Front row, left to right: a Raxacoricofallapatorian and an Adipose.
Link -via The Mary Sue | Aurora Cakes
Good news everyone! Another gaming relic from your childhood is available to play for free, thanks to those clever marketers who know that letting a game like Chex Quest make the rounds again gives you an opportunity to once again advertise your product.
The product in question is Chex cereal, and since it’s not a detestable product I’m sure many who remember the silly advertising games from the 1990s will appreciate being able to play them all again, if only for the sake of nostalgia.
Link –via Geekosystem
To make Kirbie’s delicious-looking muffins, mix mozzarella cheese and pepperoni into the batter. Cook for eighteen minutes, then add more cheese and pepperoni. Pop them in the oven for a few more minutes to encounter a new type of pizza.
Link -via Bit Rebels
Remember
the kerfuffle over the
iPhone prototype that an Apple engineer left in a restaurant and ended
up on the blog Gizmodo? Well, Apple has a plan to stop this kind of thing
from ever happening again.
No, Apple is not installing a self-destruct sequence on their prototypes - rather, it is going to construct its own restaurant exclusively for Apple employees:
According to Apple’s director of real estate facilities, Dan Whisenhunt, the construction of the two-story restaurant is a direct result of security concerns: “We like to provide a level of security so that people and employees can feel comfortable talking about their business, their research and whatever project they’re engineering without fear of competition cort of overhearing their conversations. That is a real issue today in Cupertino because we’ve got other companies here in our same business,” he told the Planning Commission, leaving out the part about employees also tending to leave sensitive prototypes of future releases in public for random people to find and sell to websites, causing all manner of embarrassment to the company.
Not too long ago, mental_floss had an article about bygone items that included a church key. Young commenters were mostly familiar with the item they know as a “bottle opener,” but didn’t know it was once called a “church key.” That term is back now, thanks to the Churchkey Can Company, which brews beer sold in flat-top cans that require a church key to open them. If that’s the major selling point, you have to wonder whether it will last past the novelty phase. That will depend on whether the beer is good! Link
You already smell like a library. Now, thanks to the coffee company Intelligensia Coffee, you can taste a librarian without getting slapped:
The Librarian’s Blend is named for that person who always told you to keep quiet when you were studying. This blend is representative of the soul of the librarian: steady, reassuring, and always there with that slight edge of eccentricity. It has a bold base with a bit of sparkle. Here’s to good reading.
Another flavored offered by the company is “Honey Badger.” It’s a bit more vigorous.
Link -via Annoyed Librarian | Image: Unshelved
This is a whole, uncooked egg, minus the shell. To make one of your own, soak an egg in vinegar for two days. The acetic acid in the vinegar will break down the shell while hardening the contents.
Link -via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: Flickr user gimsling
What?!
Nutella isn't healthy? Mom Athena Hohenberg claimed that she was duped
into thinking that the popular chocolate hazelnut spread was healthy for
her daughter.
So, she sued ... and won!
Have you bought a jar of Nutella in the past four years? Were you under the impression, as you slathered the creamy hazlenut spread onto your crackers or scooped large spoonfuls of it from the jar directly into your mouth, that you were indulging a health food craving? Well, you could soon find yourself at least $4 wealthier.
Yes, that's right. Ferrero, the company that manufactures the highly addictive yet apparently not terribly healthy spread, has settled a $3 million lawsuit filed in February 2011 by San Diego mom Athena Hohenberg.
Hohenberg, it seems, believed that Nutella was a great dietary choice for her four-year-old daughter. She claimed the company's advertising -- particularly giving TV-ad viewers the idea that Nutella was part of a nutritious breakfast [...] -- led to her erroneous perception.
But when she realized the spread is about as healthy as your average Snickers bar, she decided it was time to get even -- and get cash.
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