Tag: food

Morning sickness may be sign of a bright baby

SICK of morning sickness? Take heart: it may be a sign that your child is developing a high IQ.

Irena Nulman and colleagues at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, contacted 120 women who years earlier had called a morning sickness hotline. Thirty did not have morning sickness, but the researchers asked the rest to recall the severity of their sickness, and gave the children of all the women, now aged between 3 and 7, a standard intelligence test. Those whose mothers had nausea and vomiting during pregnancy were more likely to get high scores than those whose mothers did not (The Journal of Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2009.02.005). The reported severity of the vomiting also correlated with the IQ scores.

Morning sickness, which affects most pregnant women, is thought to be a reaction to the hormones human chorionic gonadotropin and thyroxine, which are secreted at unusually high levels during pregnancy to maintain a healthy placenta. Now Nulman speculates that these hormones, which are higher in women who experience morning sickness, may protect the fetus’s developing brain.

Her team found that taking the morning sickness drug Diclectin had no effect on the IQ scores.

:: Read original here ::

Foods ‘should label up eco-costs’

  • Venue: BBC

Food packaging could be embedded with computer chips that instantly link your phone to an on-line sustainable food guide, a UK conference has heard.

The guides would help consumers navigate their way through the ethical and ecological decisions about what they eat, the proponents argue.

The UK should lead Europe on this approach, food policy expert Professor Tim Lang said.

He was speaking at the British Association Science Festival.

Ethical impact

The criteria used to judge food sustainability are still up for debate.

“Do I eat green beans from Kenya, because they are good for me, or do I say no because there are four litres of water embedded in each stem of green bean?” asked Professor Lang, from City University, London.

He said scientists and policy-makers now realised the environmental, ethical, and health impacts of the food we ate.

Producers needed to find a way to present this information to the consumer, he told the conference.

He outlined a number of criteria that consumers should consider when buying food: how much energy and water are used to produce each calorie of food; what is the impact of the food item on climate, biodiversity, and the labour-force of the country it was grown in, and what are the health and financial costs of food.

Criteria agreement

“Packaging could be the point of entry for [this] information,” said Professor Lang.

Information on socio-economic and environmental criteria could be presented simply through “food flowers” – diagrams where each petal represents a different impact, with the shaded area of a petal showing how highly a food item scores.

The more detailed information could be accessed from a website and uploaded from food packaging to our mobile phones.

There would, however, need to be universal agreement on which issues should be reflected in the labels.

“That needs governments to agree with companies, to agree with civil society to agree what those criteria are,” explained Professor Lang.

:: Read original here ::

Food for Thought: delivering the promise of food processing

Humans have transformed raw ingredients into food since prehistoric times. But scientists are still looking for new ways to make food taste better and survive longer. Presenting their findings at a recent European Science Foundation (ESF) and European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST) conference, scientists show how new food technologies are changing European diets.

The industrial revolution brought the advent of modern food processing technology. Whether you credit the Frenchman Nicholas Appert in 1809, or British born Peter Durand in 1810, the invention of the tin can has revolutionised the way people eat. The motivation behind its invention was simple – make food last long. Two hundred years on, food scientists are still trying to improve the shelf life of food.

:: Read more at European Science Foundation ::

Far flung food: Europe’s distant diets

Across the European Union, food is travelling more, and not always in ways that make sense. Consider the chocolate covered waffle: Last year, Britain both imported 14,000 tonnes, and exported 15,000 tonnes. And it is not just waffles that are travelling further, as Europeans are eating – and importing – more food from outside the EU than ever before.

At a recent conference, funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST), scientists and policy makers gathered to consider the problems that face future European food supplies. One important area of research looks at where food comes from, and how that food gets from the field to the fork.

:: Read more at European Science Foundation ::

Watching what we eat: food systems in Europe

Food has never been more of a global commodity than it is today. But there is an urgent need to understand the problems that face future European food supplies within this global market. And so scientists and policy makers gathered in Budapest last week to push for a more holistic approach to the study of what Europeans eat.

The conference, supported by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST), looked at where food comes from, the ways in which it is processed, packaged and distributed, and how it is sold and eventually eaten.

:: Read more at European Science Foundation ::