Friday, December 12

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A Food Safety Researcher Explains Food Expiration Dates Don’t Have Much Science Behind Them – Here’s Another Way To Know What’s Too Old To Eat
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NUTRITION

A Food Safety Researcher Explains Food Expiration Dates Don’t Have Much Science Behind Them – Here’s Another Way To Know What’s Too Old To Eat

Florida’s outbreak of listeria has so far led to at least one death, 22 hospitalizations and an ice cream recall since January. Humans get sick with listeria infections, or listeriosis, from eating soil-contaminated food, undercooked meat or dairy products that are raw, or unpasteurized. Listeria can cause convulsions, coma, miscarriage and birth defects. And it’s the third leading cause of food poisoning deaths in the U.S. Avoiding unseen food hazards is the reason people often check the dates on food packaging. And printed with the month and year is often one of a dizzying array of phrases: “best by,” “use by,” “best if used before,” “best if used by,” “guaranteed fresh until,” “freeze by” and even a “born on” label applied to some beer. People think of them as expiration dates, or the...
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The Chemistry Of Cooking Over An Open Flame – What Makes Smoky, Charred Barbecue Taste So Good?
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The Chemistry Of Cooking Over An Open Flame – What Makes Smoky, Charred Barbecue Taste So Good?

The mere thought of barbecue’s smokey scents and intoxicating flavors is enough to get most mouths watering. Summer is here, and that means it is barbecue season for many people in the U.S. I am a chemist who studies compounds found in nature, and I am also a lover of food – including barbecue. Cooking on a grill may seem simple, but there is a lot of chemistry that sets barbecue apart from other cooking methods and results in such a delicious experience. Cooking over an open flame – whether from gas, wood or charcoal – allows you to use both radiant and conductive heat to cook food. Romary/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Cooking with fire First, it is important to define barbecue because the term can mean different things in different cultures or geographic locations. At its most basic, barb...
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Whats Good: Sugar Detox? Cutting Carbs? A Doctor Explains Why You Should Keep Fruit On The Menu
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Whats Good: Sugar Detox? Cutting Carbs? A Doctor Explains Why You Should Keep Fruit On The Menu

One of my patients – who had been struggling with obesity, uncontrolled diabetes and the cost of her medications – agreed in June 2019 to adopt a more whole-food plant-based diet. Excited by the challenge, she did a remarkable job. She increased her fresh fruit and vegetable intake, stopped eating candy, cookies and cakes and cut down on foods from animal sources. Over six months, she lost 19 pounds and her HbA1c – a measure of her average blood sugar – dropped from 11.5% to 7.6%. She was doing so well, I expected that her HbA1c would continue to drop and she would be one of our plant-based successes who had reversed diabetes. Her three-month follow-up visit in March 2020 was canceled because of COVID-19 lockdowns. When I eventually saw her again in May 2021, she’d regained some of the ...
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Free Soul Food Recipes Breaking New Ground
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Free Soul Food Recipes Breaking New Ground

Free soul food recipes continue to break new ground. While more health experts are complaining about the high calorie, salt and fat content in soul food, more websites are heading the call for healthier recipes. The huge (pardon the pun) problems with obesity is blamed on the high fat and calorie content in much of the food we eat. To respond to this growing demand, more soul food recipe publishers, websites and restaurants are offering healthier recipes. The response? A growing resurgence in the popularity of this southern cuisine. An added bonus is attracting the interest of new people to this southern comfort food. Examples of Healthy Changes Examples of healthier changes is replacing many of the high fat seasonings, such as fat back, ham hocks and bacon drippings. These traditional ...
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Want To Persuade Americans To Swap Out Beef For Plant-Based Burgers, Taste Alone Won’t Do It
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Want To Persuade Americans To Swap Out Beef For Plant-Based Burgers, Taste Alone Won’t Do It

The big idea Consumers are more likely to choose a plant-based meat substitute when the restaurant’s advertising highlights the social benefits of doing so rather than its taste, according to recently published research I conducted with a colleague. We also found that showcasing the social costs of meat consumption also leads to a preference for plant-based “meats.” To reach this conclusion, we conducted two online experiments to examine the advertising of plant-based burgers and meatballs. Participants were recruited via the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk. In the first one, 156 participants were shown one of three commercials for a plant-based burger. They saw either a social appeal (“good for the environment and animal welfare”), a health appeal (“good for your health – n...
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How SNAP can help people during hard economic times like these
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How SNAP can help people during hard economic times like these

A record number of Americans are seeing their hours cut or losing their jobs due to the initial economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic. How will millions of newly jobless families keep putting food on the table? They might get some help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The nation’s largest anti-hunger system helped about 35 million low-income people buy groceries in 2019, down from a peak of over 47 million in 2013 in the aftermath of the Great Recession. After repeatedly trying to scale back SNAP the White House recently agreed to Congress’s efforts to ramp it back up. The Families First Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on March 18, included an additional US$1 billion in funding for other nutrition programs and will let more people enroll ...
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Pull off a stress-free Thanksgiving dinner with this turkey day menu and timeline
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Pull off a stress-free Thanksgiving dinner with this turkey day menu and timeline

Let’s face it, no matter how wonderful it is to be surrounded by family and friends on Thanksgiving, cooking for a group of people is an incredibly daunting task. For most people, prepping for turkey day takes days to mentally and physically prepare. In order to pull off a successful dinner that you’ll actually enjoy, planning ahead is key. That means shopping well in advance, cooking dishes in advance that hold well in the refrigerator and following our Thanksgiving menu and timeline. Here’s the menu the Southern Kitchen team will be whipping up come Thanksgiving: The Mains Oven-Roasted Turkey Virginia Willis’ Bourbon Baked Ham The Sides Grilled Kabocha Squash Salad with Maple Vinaigrette Oyster Cornbread Dressing Bebe’s Green Beans Bourbon Collard Greens Extra Cheesy Mac and Cheese...
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How Southern Communities Tackle Summertime Food Scarcity
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How Southern Communities Tackle Summertime Food Scarcity

Without free and reduced school lunch programs during the summer, many children go hungry. Local organizations and churches are stepping up to help to narrow the food gap. Jasmine Caston’s weekdays begin before the sun rises. A single mother of two daughters, Caston works full time and goes to school. Every day is a juggling act. To be sure it goes well, she and her children need to be out of the house no later than 6:20 a.m. Nine months of the year, this isn’t a big problem. The girls are in school. But summertime? That’s a different story. A mythology surrounding school’s summer vacation days is that they’re fun and restorative for children and their families. But this mythology has rarely applied to low-income families of color, especially across the American South, whe...
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The Surprising Links Between Family Dinner and Good Health

Adults who prepare quality meals for children are offering something more important than a nutrition lesson. When the 10 Garcia-Prats boys got together every night for dinner, they shared more than food around the table. They talked about the successes and frustrations of their days. The older boys helped the younger ones cut their meat. They compared their picks for the World Cup, a conversation that turned into an impromptu geography lesson. Their mother, Cathy, author of Good Families Don’t Just Happen: What We Learned from Raising Our Ten Sons and How It Can Work for You, strove to make the dinner table warm and welcoming, a place where her boys would want to linger. “Our philosophy is that dinnertime is not just a time to feed your body; it’s a time to feed your mind and ...
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The Battle For Minimum Weight – Blacks and the Obesity Epidemic
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The Battle For Minimum Weight – Blacks and the Obesity Epidemic

Caught up in the frenetic grind of her fashion industry job, Allison Ferrell, 41, paid little attention to her increasing waistline. As Manager of Product Operation and Logistics for Abaete, a New York-based luxury apparel line, lunch was a luxury she couldn't afford. She said she was crazed and I couldn't spare the time so If I didn't eat by 1:00 p.m. that was it for the rest of the day. After a 2005 surgery left her stomach upset, she routinely avoided a litany of foods and routinely skipped meals. Her erratic eating habits kicked her body into pre-starvation mode. Believing it was starving, her body stopped burning calories and began to store food reserves causing an increase in body fat. I'd had a good run, but my negative habits were catching up with me and now it was time to take ca...
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