News 2019

What better accompaniment to festive feasting and your impending food coma than a roundup of tasty stories from 2019? Sit back as Imperial serves up some festive food for thought, featuring unusual stuffing, strange pudding, dried cricket snacks, and food sensors. After all, 'tis the season to be jolly and enjoy all the treats Christmas has to offer! Grub's up In the 1800s, lobsters were considered the food of slaves and prisoners; a poor person's food.

ETH researchers are making chocolates shimmer in rainbow colours without the addition of colourants. They have found a way to imprint a special structure on the surface of the chocolate to create a targeted colour effect. By playing this video, you agree to the use of cookies by YouTube This may include analytics, personalization, and ads.

More than one in three lowand middle-income countries are facing high levels of obesity and under-nourishment, according to a report involving UCL researchers. The report, published today in The Lancet,  says a new approach is needed to help reduce the 'double burden' of undernutrition and obesity at the same time, as the issues become increasingly connected due to rapid changes in countries' food systems.

Labelling food and drink with the amount and type of exercise needed to burn off its calorie content may be a more effective way of encouraging people to make 'healthier' dietary choices, shows research carried out in collaboration with the University of Birmingham.

Researchers at Oxford University, together with and international colleagues, have discovered jet stream patterns that could affect up to a quarter of global food production. In a new study published today , scientists show how specific wave patterns in the jet stream strongly increase the chance of co-occurring heatwaves in major food producing regions of Northern America, Western Europe and Asia.

Sleep can impact an individual's health in many ways. University of Minnesota researchers were interested in how much teens sleep at night is related to their weight, eating habits and physical activity. Their findings were published in the journal Childhood Obesity.

Over 30 million Chinese children, aged between seven and 18, are overweight or obese - placing them at greater risk of an early death and this number is set to rise to 50 million by 2030, caused in part by the role grandparents play in childcare. Researchers at the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol worked with Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, enlisting 1,641 six-year-old children across 40 primary schools in Guangzhou to evaluate the effectiveness of the CHIRPY DRAGON programme in tackling childhood obesity.

Educating parents and grandparents - as well as improving physical activity and the food provided at school - could hold the key to solving China's obesity pandemic, according to one of the largest trials of childhood obesity prevention in the world. Over 30 million Chinese children, aged between seven and 18, are overweight or obese - placing them at greater risk of an early death and this number is set to rise to 50 million by 2030, caused in part by the role grandparents play in childcare.

Crafty engineering can help solve many problems, including those we face in our own kitchens. At EPFL's Institute of Mechanical Engineering, students from three laboratories tackled some of the most common kitchen challenges as part of the first Kitchen-Inspired Engineering contest. Cooking the perfect poached egg is a lot trickier than it looks.

Scientists from Inra and the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (Italy) have shown that not all weed communities (spontaneous vegetation) generate crop yield losses, even in unweeded conditions, and that high weed diversity is associated to a reduced risk of important crop yield losses. Published in Nature Sustainability , these results provide new grounds for sustainable weed management.

Popular commercial meal kit subscription services assessed for nutritional quality were found to provide adequate serves of core foods such as vegetables - but there was room to improve to meet dietary guidelines. With many people spending less time cooking and more time eating out and ordering takeaways, the food industry has adapted by introducing commercial meal kit subscription services that deliver recipes and fresh, pre-measured ingredients direct to people's doors.

Study reveals intriguing first look at differences caused by eating raw vs cooked meat and vegetables The gut microbiome undergoes rapid and dramatic changes in species composition and gene expression when the host switches between eating cooked or raw vegetables, according to a team of scientists led by UC San Francisco and Harvard University.

Thousands of years ago, as humans tamed wild animals and plants into livestock and crops, their penchant for intoxication also led them to unwittingly domesticate a hidden workhorse of civilization: yeast. Today, Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the bedrock of food cultures around the world. The yeast turns flour into bread and sugary drinks into beer and wine.

A study of passengers travelling on long haul Qantas flights provides an insight into the ways travellers are trying to minimise feelings of jetlag. The research is part of ongoing studies the airline is conducting with the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre to identify evidence-based methods to reduce fatigue.

10/17/2019 Around 20 percent of the world's agricultural areas yields less than it did 20 years ago. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO, humans are the culprit: we have not done enough to protect biodiversity. In many respects, nature is an outstanding service provider for agriculture.

Recent nationwide polls show Americans are divided about soda taxes. Overall, people tend to be more supportive of calorie-labeling and removing sugary drinks from schools, but less so for a general soda tax. It is important to gather enough evidence to inform meaningful public policy debates, as well as ensure that the evidence clearly shows soda taxes can reduce consumption and improve health outcomes before implementing them, according to a new report from the Center for Public Finance at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

New study shows the relation between cardiovascular diseases and nutrition in Europe Life Of the 4.3 million cardiovascular deaths in Europe in 2016, 2.1 million were the result of poor nutrition. The 28 EU member states account for around 900,000, Russia for 600,000 and the Ukraine for 250,000 of these deaths.

In a study of 245 Stanford physicians, researchers found that a better diet is associated with reduced side effects of sleep deprivation. Nutrition scientist   Maryam Hamidi , PhD, conducted research recently which required her to repeatedly stay awake from 8 a.m. until 5 a.m. the next day.

People eat more with friends and family than when dining alone - a possible throwback to our early ancestors' approach to survival, according to a new study. Previous studies found that those eating with others ate up to 48 per cent more food than solo diners and women with obesity eating socially consumed up to 29 per cent more than when eating alone.

Most people want to eat healthier, but efforts to encourage healthy eating by providing nutrition information have not changed habits much. A new study suggests that labels emphasizing taste and positive experience could help. Eating well isn't always easy, and the reality is simply telling people which foods to avoid doesn't do much to get them to eat better.