DailyDirt: Seriously, You Are What You Eat...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Oct 28th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

There's still a lot people don't know about biology, and the way biological molecules can be transmitted. Eating food is an unavoidable way of consuming a whole range of biological compounds, and scientists are learning more and more about how foods can affect health. Here are just a few links on some interesting food science topics.

Bits of RNA from rice have been found to survive digestion and possibly alter gene expression in mammals. MicroRNA pieces that could only have come from plants were found circulating in human blood, and mice experiments suggest that microRNAs could affect cholesterol levels and act as pharmaceuticals. [url]
Food packaging labels could have a lot of unintended consequences, so it's not surprising that the food industry wants to try to control what they're required to print on their labels. For example, Nutrition Keys only took up 1.5 percent of the surface area of the packaging, potentially making the nutritional info less noticeable. [url]
The FDA is supposed to start implementing food safety rules soon, but the complexity of creating effective policies (along with a reduced budget to do so) could delay the development of new food safety procedures. Writing the rules might be the easy part, too, compared to the task of actually enforcing them... [url]
Analyzing the different types of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur in animal muscle tissue can determine the dietary history of farm animals -- which could be useful in verifying whether or not a cow was actually grass-fed its entire life (or just for its last meal). Hmmm. CSI techniques to prove how the farmer killed his cow? [url]
To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: cholesterol, food, food safety, labeling, microrna, rna
Companies: fda

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Pa, 28 Oct 2011 @ 9:03pm

What say you now pro-GMO people?
Looks like not everything has been researched about Genes and food after all. I hate to say it, but I told you so.
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Michael Ho (profile), 31 Oct 2011 @ 1:01pm

Re: What say you now pro-GMO people?
The fact that there are unknown effects from GMO foods doesn't mean we should stop researching GMOs completely... It just means we probably shouldn't introduce GMOs into the wild without a lot more scrutiny.
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lrobbo (profile), 10 Jun 2012 @ 8:12am

Yeah, to stop researching GMO food is a daft response from folk who know nothing. Makes my blood boil.
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