Designing a perky donut
Your morning double-double not cutting it? Soon you will be able to get your daily caffeine fix from a honey cruller or a bagel with cream cheese.
Dr. Robert Bohannon, a molecular biologist from the University of North Carolina has developed a way to put caffeine into pastries without its bitter taste.
Bohannon came up with the idea of caffeinated pastries six years ago when he wanted a morning caffeine jolt, but only had a glass of milk and a donut. He first experimented by adding raw caffeine to his baked goods, but, he said, it was “so bitter it would just make you puke.”
He then began to eliminate the bitterness of caffeine and turn it into a small, flour-like particle. Like other drugs that taste bitter, Bohannon’s formulation microencapsulates caffeine molecules to mask its taste. Bohannon can now put 100 milligrams of caffeine into his pastries-almost as much as the 116 mg you can get from Starbucks’ Tall Cafe Americano-but is marketing his donuts with only 50 mg.
Bohannon is currently pitching these caffeinated goodies-Buzz Donut and Buzzed Bagel-to coffee chains and bakeries, but so far the reaction to his product has been mixed.
Barry Popkin, a nutrition scientist at the University of North Carolina, likens Bohannon’s invention to putting vitamin C into a candy bar and marketing the candy bar as a way to get your daily quota of vitamin C. Popkin is already concerned with the high level of caffeine consumption in the U.S, calling this the “super-caffeine generation,” and is especially uneasy about Bohannon adding it to foods like donuts, which are already unhealthy..
Bohannon, on the other hand, urges moderation, not abstinence, from drinking or ingesting caffeine, as it does have some positive affects, such as increased alertness.
Source: AP file
-Mandy Lo
Beneath that beefy belly
You may have always suspected that your spare tire wasn’t a sign of smashing good health, but there’s more to your blubber than you know.
The fat around your belly is telling, and not only of your donut or Oreo addiction. It’s well documented that “apple-shaped” people with fat in their abdomens are more likely to have heart disease or diabetes as compared to “pear-shapes,” whose fat resides in their hips and thighs. Doctors conducting medical examinations have even begun using abdominal fat to measure the risk of either of these problems, as its presence is a faithful indicator of a defect in insulin processing.
But a new study from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is looking at what visceral fat, or the fat around organs, may tell doctors about health. However, visceral fat lies too close to the organs and cannot be removed for study, so the researchers took samples of blood that drains this fat tissue. With blood from 25 obese patients undergoing gastric bypass, the team found that the blood around visceral fat has 50 per cent more interlukin-6, a molecule that helps elicit inflammatory responses, than blood that services other parts of the body, like muscle. They also found another inflammatory molecule, C-reactive protein, which may contribute to a chronic and full-body inflammatory disease. Both molecules were produced by the visceral fat and traveled through the blood around the body.
A chronic inflammatory response, such as suggested by the presence of these molecules, is associated with insulin resistance, hypertension, and heart disease. According to the researchers, there is also evidence of inflammatory diseases in cancer and aging.
Source: Diabetes
-Sandy Huen
Finding the child in us
Humans have an unusually long childhood compared to chimpanzees, and a new study suggests we may have evolved this characteristic over 160,000 years ago. Studying the fossils of a Moroccan child, one of the earliest Homo sapiens, the research team measured tooth development-the age at which molar teeth arrive, in particular-as an indicator of how long the child remained a child. At almost eight years old, the Moroccan child shows a similar duration of childhood as modern humans, which may be linked to the cultural changes that arose to give children a greater opportunity for early learning. Compared to the six million years it took for humans to evolve, the appearance of this trait in our evolutionary history is relatively late.
Source: Max Planck Society
-S.H.
