Don’t panic! It was a very small operation in Vietnam (the police seized 336 bottles) and has been shut down. But the operation itself reminds us that there is an ongoing fight against food fraud.
An interesting review published this week in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry delves into the subject of vitamin B12 in food and how to prevent deficiencies.
With approx. 60,000 cases of food poisoning caused by E.coli 0157:H7 reported each year in the U.S., scientists at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been looking at ways to tackle this problem.
It does sound obvious, fertilise the potato plants well to ensure they produce good potatoes. But here is the interesting part, the amount of nitrogen and sulphur in the fertiliser affect the levels of sugars and free amino acids. This is important because this has an effect on the colour,…
Following the as yet unpublished study results from an independent Italian laboratory, Splenda or sucralose has been downgraded from safe to caution by the Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).
Getting some exercise is good for you. Nothing new there, but what is new is the discovery that exercise increases the amount of brown fat (a good fat) in the body and this has beneficial knock on effects on the rest of the body.
Maybe storing our vegetables in the dark underbelly of the fridge is not the best place to keep them fresh. According to research published ahead of print on the website of the Journal Current Biology, cabbages are able to respond to day and night cycles for up to one week…
Farmers beware! 5 out of 13 key insect species have become immune to Bt, the built-in pesticide expressed by GM corn and cotton. That is the startling message from a paper published in Nature reported last week in the New Scientist magazine (June 15th 2013, Page 8-9).
Thanks to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) of the UK, you can. They are currently calling for views on phytosterol esters, a compound found in low levels in vegetable oil that has been shown to reduce LDL (the bad) cholesterol. This is because Unilever have made an application for their…
Well, it works on fruit flies at least, that is the findings of a group of scientists from the University of California Irvine, California, USA. The team had previously shown that the extract of Rhodiola rosea could increase the life span of flies, worms and yeast but this time wanted…


