Food Science Articles and Links

[chromedome]

This skews more to agriculture than food science in the direct sense, but "ag science" is basically food science on a macro scale so I'm putting it here rather than in one of our discussions of how food is grown. Short version is that the OP will be writing regularly about the intersection of agricultural and environmental issues.
 

 

[chromedome]

Interesting, albeit the "language" part is rather a stretch. Underlying study is linked in the article, so you can read it for yourself if you wish.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/06/fungi-electrical-impulses-human-language-study

[chromedome]

'Informed hypocrisy" is a great line.

 

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/whats-the-most-climate-friendly-way-to-eat-its-tricky

[chromedome]

A bit of vindication for potato lovers:

 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.867378/full

 

(ETA: Yeah, I know, the funding came from potato growers. But they do make a case...)

Edited June 11, 2022 by chromedome (log)

[chromedome]

I'm putting this here as the best fit among several candidates.

 

We've spoken at times on various threads about the various efforts being made to produce food in a more environmentally-friendly manner. There tend to be many, many viewpoints on this, and some deeply-entrenched positions, and relatively few voices attempting a non-dogmatic overview of (to steal a phrase from another link I posted recently) an appropriate level of "informed hypocrisy." Journalists Tamar Haspel and Mike Grunwald are attempting to do just that in a new podcast called Climavores, and they were interviewed about it by the Columbia Journalism Review. So, for those who are interested, here's your look at what they're doing and how they're attempting to do it.

https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/climavores-food-climate-grunwald-haspel.php

 

Disclaimer: I follow Haspel on Twitter but haven't listened to the podcast yet, because time to just listen to something is extremely hard for me to block out. Sadly, there's no transcript (at least, not yet) attached to each episode.

[chromedome]

Is everyone familiar with "the law of unintended consequences"? An interesting discussion of how the move away from hydrogenated oils, and toward plant-based foods, has created some issues around the supply of culinary fats.

 

https://www.the-angry-chef.com/blog/big-fat-problems

[chromedome]

https://www.science.org/content/article/supercharged-biotech-rice-yields-40-more-grain

[farcego]

 

I just found this story in tweeter:

https://hakaimagazine.com/news/130-year-old-menus-show-how-climate-change-is-already-affecting-what-we-eat/

 

But I don't have access to the oroginal research article:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10641-022-01244-6

 

Not sure what to think before reading the full paper and see how they worked other aspects like increase of transport, refrigeration, and global fishing fleet.

[heidih]

Interesting data collection points but nothing approaching research conclusions. We do need to monitor. From the article "The temporal and spatial variations in MTRS are significantly related to observed patterns of average sea surface temperature and the Mean Temperature of the Catch. This suggests that restaurant menus may be used as a complementary information source regarding changes in marine ecosystems and fisheries and the seafood sector’s responses to these changes. This study also highlights the value of using unconventional information sources and their applications in the detection of climate impacts on oceans and their dependent human communities."

[chromedome]

In an entirely predictable outcome, the editor-in-chief of SciAm has been targeted online for publishing this piece:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eating-too-much-protein-makes-pee-a-problem-pollutant-in-the-u-s/

 

For those who have access to such things through work or a library, here's the study itself:

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/fee.2531

[chromedome]

A recent review of how the various macronutients affect satiety and weight gain/loss. The TL;DR version? "It's complicated," and most of the prevailing theories (such as the carbohydrate/insulin model) have sparse support in the data and plenty of contradictions.

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451965021000946

[gfweb]

On 7/30/2022 at 6:40 AM, chromedome said:

In an entirely predictable outcome, the editor-in-chief of SciAm has been targeted online for publishing this piece:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eating-too-much-protein-makes-pee-a-problem-pollutant-in-the-u-s/

 

For those who have access to such things through work or a library, here's the study itself:

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/fee.2531

 

Despite being revered by high school science teachers, SA is science journalism, not science.   It has no trouble taking positions on issues and perhaps even an agenda. I don't know, though, I never look at it.

[gfweb]

Eating Ultraprocessed foods, defined as industrial ready to heat products (more or less) show increases in some cancers.

 

Beware, correlation is not causation.

 

I still find it hard to understand why processing itself is risky.  Plant-based fake meat is as ultraprocessed as one can get, yet it is supposed to be a good thing.

 

Is a diet of t his sort the cause or merely the marker for other cancer risks?

 

https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj-2021-068921

[heidih]

54 minutes ago, gfweb said:

Is a diet of t his sort the cause or merely the marker for other cancer risks?

https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj-2021-068921

Not exactly breaking news been spouted for some time.. Yes I see it as a marker for other less than ideal food choices (like maybe zero fresh fruit and veg) Makes sense for colo-rectal issues.

Edited September 2, 2022 by heidih (log)

[chromedome]

Kind of a cool overview of the science underlying nutrition.

 

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-food-powers-your-body-metabolism-calories

[chromedome]

The future of coffee? Maybe?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/your-next-pour-over-may-be-liberica-or-excelsa/

[chromedome]

A topic we've discussed desultorily a few times over the years. It's becoming less hypothetical all the time.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/synthetic-meat-will-change-the-ethics-of-eating-11671805446?page=1

[chromedome]

This is a fairly dense read, and it's a study with a small sample size, but it's interesting for its attempt at quantifying factors that affect satiety/overeating (and how their interaction might skew other studies). This is a full-text that was shared by one of the authors.

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00688-4.epdf?sharing_token=KgEBnd6egiIK5Ns25WLfZ9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MXbIHcvsR6IbJXZM86QMg7OnKDe21o1QCCSncQVux_J6KBgDXmdGnwqRfjXyZQF_25UP83ZgQF4JtHAnHsoc5vO_l5zBICiCiG9tPeqhKOOT-k06htRF5TO3rJCduy080%3D

[heidih]

And NYT jumps on   https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/well/eat/food-addiction-fat.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20230201&instance_id=84168&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=89866068&segment_id=124078&te=1&user_id=85b30ef4fce69e5d87cd5f82ee66fb39

[chromedome]

The Atlantic has just published a story about "nutrition academia" and its response to persistent results across two decades of studies, indicating that - wait for it - ice cream, of all things, might be good for diabetics.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cream-bad-for-you-health-study/673487/

[chromedome]

WaPo columnist Tamar Haspel is fond of pointing out that questions of food, agriculture and sustainability are "all compromises, all the time." We've all seen lots of heated (and inconclusive, and often bad-faith) arguments around things like faux meats and the relative environmental impact of different forms of agriculture ("It's not the cow, it's the how"), but few good ways to compare the impacts of foods on a broad basis.

 

The Economist has come up with an intriguingly simple yardstick for evaluating the carbon cost of foods, which it calls The Banana Index. It uses the banana as a baseline, because it's middling in terms of its climate impact and nutrition, and evaluates other foodstuffs against that baseline. It ranks foods on their emissions impact by weight, by calorie, and by protein value (emissions/100g of protein). Reading the article itself (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/04/11/a-different-way-to-measure-the-climate-impact-of-food) requires registration or a subscription, but this Twitter thread gives you a look at the print version and also a few of the charts.

 

 

[scott123]

On 4/13/2023 at 12:52 PM, chromedome said:

The Atlantic has just published a story about "nutrition academia" and its response to persistent results across two decades of studies, indicating that - wait for it - ice cream, of all things, might be good for diabetics.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cream-bad-for-you-health-study/673487/

Here's the primary study that the article is referencing:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6821541/

 

Quote

The authors’ responsibilities were as follows—J-PD-C and FBH: designed the research; J-PD-C: performed the statistical analyses and drafted the manuscript; YL and AVAK: contributed to the statistical analyses; J-PD-C and FBH: share the responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the analysis; and all authors: read, edited, and approved the final manuscript. J-PD-C received speaker and consulting honoraria from the Dairy Farmers of Canada in 2016 and 2018, outside the current work. BL has received investigator-initiated and peer-reviewed research funding from the Dairy Farmers of Canada and National Dairy Council for research outside of the current work over the last 5 y. BL has also received speaker honoraria from the Dairy Farmers of Canada over the same period. None of the other authors reported a conflict of interest related to the study.

Also, this:

 

Quote

In the 3 cohorts, dietary information was collected and updated every 4 y using a semiquantitative FFQ. Participants were asked how often on average they consumed a standard portion size of each food in the past year, from “never or less than once per month” to “≥6 times per day.”

 

FFQ is "food frequency questionnaire."   Think about someone asking you how much dairy you've consumed in the last year.  I can't even tel you how much dairy I ate last week.

 

So, we have a ridiculously imprecise, self reported, observational and retrospective study performed by researchers with clear ties to big dairy.  And the net takeaway from the reporting is that people at risk for diabetes should eat ice cream.  It is not hyperbole in the slightest to say that this article will kill people.  Shame on the Atlantic for this dangerous, click-baity garbage.

Edited April 14, 2023 by scott123 (log)

[heidih]

@scott123 Yes! Click bait, headline hocus pocus drama is constant. I only read some to be able to make a calm down comment to people who have not a clue what responsible peer reviewed articles are. Now something like the Nurses' Health Study I give respect. https://nurseshealthstudy.org/about-nhs/history

[chromedome]

A look at improved/improving beef-cattle husbandry in Brazil..

 

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/cattle-are-a-huge-climate-threat-smarter-ranching-can-help

[chromedome]

On 4/14/2023 at 6:51 PM, heidih said:

@scott123 Yes! Click bait, headline hocus pocus drama is constant. I only read some to be able to make a calm down comment to people who have not a clue what responsible peer reviewed articles are. Now something like the Nurses' Health Study I give respect. https://nurseshealthstudy.org/about-nhs/history

The study Scott linked, one of several cited in The Atlantic article, did in fact use the first and second Nurses' Health Studies, and the Health Professionals' Followup Study as its data sources.

 

On 4/14/2023 at 5:04 PM, scott123 said:

FFQ is "food frequency questionnaire."   Think about someone asking you how much dairy you've consumed in the last year.  I can't even tel you how much dairy I ate last week.

 

Well, I'm not a healthcare professional participating in a formal study, but I can tell you that I have a few tablespoons of milk in my oatmeal each morning, a half-cup of yogurt 5 or 6 times/week, a tablespoon or so of evaporated milk in my coffee a couple of times/day (I prefer it to cream) and maybe 4 or 5 portions of cheese in the run of a week. It doesn't require a lot of thought. We all know FFQs are deeply flawed, but we still use them because essentially every form of food-related research is deeply flawed. Applying those flawed tools as best we can, and finding the commonalities in the results/checking whether results with different methodologies cancel each other out, is what we've got to work with.

 

On 4/14/2023 at 5:04 PM, scott123 said:

 

So, we have a ridiculously imprecise, self reported, observational and retrospective study performed by researchers with clear ties to big dairy. 

 

Yup, two of the nine researchers on the paper (including the lead) had accepted honoraria to speak at dairy industry functions, and one of them (not the lead) has done research funded by the dairy industry. It's not exactly news that most industries seek input and insights from researchers, or that the bulk of research in most industries is funded by those industries. If our standard for all research is that it be untainted by funding from sources other than government or disinterested philanthropic bodies, there would be very little research carried out (and government and philanthropic funding are not without issues, either).

 

I'll note in passing - for the benefit of those who haven't time to read the cited study - that it found yogurt to have a positive effect and cheese to have a negative effect, and the ice cream data were buried in the body of the text. Picking winners and losers from within the broad span of dairy products  - "clear ties to big dairy" notwithstanding - isn't the behavior of an industry shill. So that leaves the reportage.

 

On 4/14/2023 at 5:04 PM, scott123 said:

And the net takeaway from the reporting is that people at risk for diabetes should eat ice cream.  It is not hyperbole in the slightest to say that this article will kill people.  Shame on the Atlantic for this dangerous, click-baity garbage.

 

My net takeaway from the reporting was that there's considerable institutional resistance to outcomes that run counter to the expected. Galileo's famous experiment at the Leaning Tower showed that the contemporary understanding of gravity was flawed, but the university there continued to teach Aristotle for another century and more, IIRC. Similarly the doctor who suggested that going from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies without washing up was a bad idea, was hounded mercilessly by his colleagues. And more recently and pertinently, two large studies a few years ago showed that consumption of full-fat dairy correlated strongly with better (not worse) cardiovascular health than low-fat dairy, although one of them had been set up specifically to demonstrate the opposite (those results were lauded here on eG, among those of us who love butter, cream and full-fat cheese).

 

Most dietary guidelines, of course, continue to promote low-fat dairy.

 

Unfortunately every crackpot and grifter can claim to belong to that heritage, and most of them do ("Your doctor won't tell you this..."). Sad but true, and that's why we need to be discerning about this kind of thing (so while this is a rebuttal in the broad sense, I don't disagree with Scott on that point).

 

I know a lot of diabetics, because there's a lot of diabetes in my family. Most of them would read an article like that, joke about it (or roll their eyes and snort "Yeah, whatever") and continue following their current eating plan. The relatively small number of "I'm gonna eat what I want to eat" diabetics might seize on reportage like that as an excuse, but in my (yes, personal) experience they're already on that course and would not be turned from it in any case. To name just the most recent example from my extended circle, that's why my mother-in-law passed away last spring: she fought tooth and nail to avoid any restrictions on what she ate, and her liver failed as a result.She was only in her mid-70s, and should have had many more years left in her.

 

So yeah, focusing on ice cream (in the subtitle, mind you) was a way to get people interested enough to read the article. I guess I did the same by mentioning it in my summation of the article when I shared the link. But ice cream itself wasn't and isn't the point. At least, not until somebody manages to figure out what's behind the correlation, or conversely how the data pointed to an apparent correlation that wasn't there... and either of those outcomes is good and desirable.