In the U.S., the weight-loss industry is worth $78 billion.
Meat is worth $218 billion.
Sugar processing is worth $11 billion.
Soybeans are worth $65 billion.
As a point of comparison, the U.S. cigarette industry is worth about $50 billion.
We are kidding ourselves if we think that corporate interests have no effect on nutrition research. For example, Coca-Cola spent “$132.8 million on scientific research and partnerships over a five-year period” from 2010 to 2015 as a part of a campaign to absolve sweetened beverages of contributing to America’s obesity epidemic. (And it worked.)
These plants suck metals from the soil at amazing rates. Scientists hope farming the plants could provide an environmentally-friendly alternative to mining.
In recent years, Western brands including Nestlé (NSRGY), Impossible and Beyond Meat (BYND) have tapped into a growing appetite for such food and drinks in the West. Now, they’re headed east, raising fresh funding to target growth in the region, rolling out products specifically created for Asian consumers and setting up new factories on the ground.
Milo chocolate milk has been hugely popular in Southeast Asia for decades. Now the breakfast and teatime favorite is about to get shaken up — the cocoa powder will be offered as a dairy-free, ready-made beverage.
The product is one ofNestlé’s newest plant-based inventions, and it will be launched in the region this week, the company told CNN Business. Starting Thursday, the drink will hit supermarkets in Malaysia, and the Swiss multinational plans to sell it in other countries soon. (The company already offers plant-based Miloin Australia and New Zealand,butin the traditional powder form.)
“We are all about giving choices,” Juan Aranols,Nestlé’s Malaysia and Singapore chief, said in an interview. “We felt that with this growing interest for plant-based products, why not give the Milo taste everybody loves in a solution that is plant-based?”
In a recent paper, Bell argues that the principles of Mario Kart—especially the parts of it that make it so addictive and fun for players—can serve as a helpful guide to create more equitable social and economic programs that would better serve farmers in low-resource, rural regions of the developing world. That’s because, even when you’re doing horribly in Mario Kart—flying off the side of Rainbow Road, for example—the game is designed to keep you in the race.
“Farming is an awful thing to have to do if you don’t want to be a farmer,” Bell says. “You have to be an entrepreneur, you have to be an agronomist, put in a bunch of labor…and in so many parts of the world people are farmers because their parents are farmers and those are the assets and options they had.” This is a common story that Bell has come across many times during research trips to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Malawi, and other countries in southern Africa, and is what largely inspired him to focus his research on policies that could aid in development.
In his new paper, Bell argues that policies that directly provide assistance to farmers in the world’s poorest developing regions could help reduce poverty overall, while increasing sustainable and environmentally friendly practices. Bell says the idea is a lot like the way that Mario Kart gives players falling behind in the race the best power-ups, designed to bump them towards the front of the pack and keep them in the race. Meanwhile, faster players in the front don’t get these same boosts, and instead typically get weaker powers, such as banana peels to trip up a racer behind them or an ink splat to disrupt the other players’ screens. This boosting principle is called “rubber banding,” and it’s what keeps the game fun and interesting, Bell says, since there is always a chance for you to get ahead.
Find out how endocrine disrupting chemicals, like BPA, can render most men sterile by 2045. Learn about chemicals in our food that disrupt our immune system, about cancer causing chemical in hand sanitizers. See what these have to do with sperm counts falling. How do they affect wildlife, and food production. See what you can do about it!
In a head-to-head comparison against a leading treatment for malnutrition, a new supplement designed to promote helpful gut bacteria led to signs of improved growth and more weight gain, despite having 20% fewer calories.
New treatment gets starving children on the right growth trajectory.
Using Artificial Intelligence And Plant Biology, To Re-Connect People and Plants, For Health & Wellness — Dr. Lee Chae, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CTO, Brightseed.
Dr. Lee Chae, Ph.D., is a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Brightseed, a novel life sciences company, merging the tools of plant biology and artificial intelligence, with a goal of enabling a healthier future by re-illuminating and re-activating the connections between people and plants.
Dr. Chae is a seasoned R&D technology developer and has designed advanced discovery methodologies for food technology, agricultural biotech, bio-medicine, and synthetic biology. He has been a principal scientist of multiple discoveries, including machine-learning driven discovery of novel nutritional bio-actives in plants and computationally guided identification of plant-based proteins for food.
With as Ph.D in Plant Biology, Computational and Genomic Biology, from University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Chae was also a founding member of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute, and did Post-Doctoral Research at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.
Prior to Brightseed, Dr. Chae served as the VP of R&D at Hampton Creek, a company developing and marketing plant-based alternatives to conventionally-produced food products.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans.
In a paper published in the Yearbook of the American Physical Anthropology Association, Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, together with Raphael Sirtoli of Portugal, show that humans were an apex predator for about two million years. Only the extinction of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world, and the decline of animal food sources toward the end of the stone age, led humans to gradually increase the vegetable element in their nutrition, until finally they had no choice but to domesticate both plants and animals — and became farmers.
“So far, attempts to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans were mostly based on comparisons to 20th century hunter-gatherer societies,” explains Dr. Ben-Dor. “This comparison is futile, however, because two million years ago hunter-gatherer societies could hunt and consume elephants and other large animals — while today’s hunter gatherers do not have access to such bounty. The entire ecosystem has changed, and conditions cannot be compared. We decided to use other methods to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans: to examine the memory preserved in our own bodies, our metabolism, genetics, and physical build. Human behavior changes rapidly, but evolution is slow. The body remembers.”
Remote-controlled Venus flytrap “robo-plants” and crops that tell farmers when they are hit by disease could become reality after scientists developed a high-tech system for communicating with vegetation.
Researchers in Singapore linked up plants to electrodes capable of monitoring the weak electrical pulses naturally emitted by the greenery.
The scientists used the technology to trigger a Venus flytrap to snap its jaws shut at the push of a button on a smartphone app.
