How Many Extra Calories Are You Getting From Food At Work – Bruce Y. Lee

On By marketingscoopsIn Business Hacks, Content Marketing, Content Targeting, Diet/Belly, Fat Loss, Food Business, Food Recipes, Foods & Drinks, Health/Diet Plan, Health/Obesity, Healthcare StudyLeave a comment

Apparently a fair number of people take a lot of %#$% at work and eat it too.

Yesterday at the Nutrition 2018 meeting in Boston, Stephen Onufrak, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), presented what he described in a press release as “the first national study to look at the food people get at work.” Nutrition 2018 is the American Society of Nutrition’s annual meeting. Onufrak also indicated that “our results suggest that the foods people get from work do not align well with the recommendations in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.” This is a polite way of saying nutritionally some of it may be %#$%.

For the study, Onufrak and his colleagues analyzed data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Acquisition and Purchasing Survey (FoodAPS), administered to a nationally representative sample of American households. The data included what food and beverages 5,222 employed adults had indicated they had purchased and “acquired” for free at work over a 7-day period.

During the week, 8% of respondents had purchased food or beverages at work during the week, and 17% had acquired it for free. Those of you skilled in the art of acquiring food for free know that potential sources include the communal coffee machine, catering for meetings, birthdays and other celebrations, and that person or persons in the office for whom baking is a hobby or emotional outlet.

Free food may sound good but it accounted for 71% of all of the calories acquired at work. (Those who got food or beverages at work, got an average of 1277 calories from work). Also, food from work, whether purchased or obtained for free, tended to be “high in empty calories, sodium, and refined grains and low in whole grains and fruit.” And surprise! The leading foods were “pizza, soft drinks, cookies/brownies, cakes and pies, and candy.” Not exactly broccoli florets and kale.

Thus, with all the pizzas and pies around, what this study suggest is that you may want to shut your pie (you know what) at work. There are a lot of distractions around you such as the conversations that you are having, the other people that are walking around, the cat videos on your computer screen, and oh, of course, the work that you have to do. You may not realize or be keeping track of the extra calories, salt, fat, sugar, and other bad stuff that is going into your mouth.

Remember, you spend a lot of your waking hours (and in some cases sleeping hours) at work. Thus, workplace food can really affect your diet. What, then, do you do besides convincing the baker in your office to find a different emotional outlet? Here are some possibilities:

Don’t talk to or interact with anyone: You can reduce your chances of getting free food by hissing at everyone when they see you. Of course, this could have other negative consequences.
Eat selectively: When food comes around, pay attention to its nutritional content.
Don’t position yourself close to food: If your desk is in the office kitchen, then that not only is a bit odd (assuming that you don’t do kitchen-related work) but also makes you more likely to eat unconsciously.
Convince your workplace to bring or offer healthier options: It may not seem appealing to be known as “that kale guy who took our pizza away” or the woman who “made the workplace grapes again instead of cakes the workplace again.” But in the long run people may thank you.
Be careful about drinking at work: Not just drinking alcohol but anything sugar-sweetened. Beverages can be a prominent source of empty calories and sugar.
Eat when you are not at work: Don’t regularly rely on free food for your meals.
Pack and bring your food: This requires some time, planning, and organization. That’s why fast food is called fast food. One possibility is to form a “foodpool” with some co-workers and take turns preparing food for each other. Just make sure that your “foodpool” doesn’t have more than a hundred people because it may be overwhelming when it is your day to bring the food.
Scout out places around the workplace that serve healthy food: This could also get you to walk around more.

Finally, keep in mind, you often get what you pay for nutritionally. Workplaces may try to save money by getting cheaper and more convenient foods and beverages, which tend to be highly processed and higher in salt, sugar, fat, and artificial ingredients. You may still be able to find healthy food at work but may have to work at it.

If everyone who reads our articles and like it , that would be favorable if you send us your donations…THANK YOU

Amazon Is Getting Ready To Crush LaCroix – Alison Griswold

On By marketingscoopsIn Amazon Business News, Business Hacks, Business/Innovation, Content Marketing, Food Business, Foods & DrinksLeave a comment

Amazon and Whole Foods are about to shake up the US seltzer market.

Whole Foods is currently offering steep discounts on 12-packs of flavored sparkling water by 365 Everyday Value, its private label, at stores in the San Francisco area. The $3.99, buy-one-get-one-free deal is exclusive for Amazon Prime members who download the Whole Foods app and sign in with their Prime accounts. It’s also a clear shot at LaCroix, a popular seltzer brand among American millennials, a 12-pack of which retails for $5.99 at Whole Foods stores in San Francisco.

The deal highlights how Amazon is using Whole Foods, which it bought for $13.7 billion in June 2017, to go after some of the hottest brands in consumer-packaged goods. Whole Foods introduced 365-branded canned sparkling water in September 2017, a month after Amazon closed the acquisition. The drink is available nationally in five flavors—lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit, and “pure”—with a new ginger flavor set to launch this September, a Whole Foods spokesman told Quartz.

“I’ve got to laugh when they do grapefruit,” said Barry Joseph, author of the forthcoming book, Seltzertopia. “LaCroix made grapefruit a standard flavor for seltzer. If someone’s putting out seltzers that include grapefruit, they’re clearly going after the market that LaCroix developed, even if they don’t call it pamplemousse.”

A deal for Amazon Prime members on 365 sparkling water at Whole Foods in Berkeley, California.

More Americans are drinking seltzer than ever before. From 2008 to 2017, sales of unflavored carbonated water more than doubled in the US to 770 million gallons, according to data from industry research firm Euromonitor.

The frothiest company in the market is National Beverage Corp., LaCroix’s parent, which reported $827 million in sales during its 2017 fiscal year, up 17% over the previous fiscal year. Once a favorite of Midwestern moms, LaCroix has been reborn a millennial status symbol whose shiny pastel cans fill the fridges of Los Angeles screenwriters and Silicon Valley startups, and have even inspired a line of T-shirts.

“WOW… what a year!” declared Nick Caporella, National Beverage Corp.’s 81-year-old chairman and CEO, in the 2017 annual report. The company’s stock price (ticker: FIZZ), rose 90% in the 2017 calendar year, hitting an all-time high of $126.40 in September.

Whole Foods’ 365 seltzer line was in the works before the Amazon acquisition, a spokesman told Quartz. Late last year, Whole Foods named sparkling water as a “top food trend” for 2018.

“Some people say LaCroix was the peak of seltzertopia,” Joseph said. “When we see things like Bubly from Pepsi and this from Amazon, it’s clear that we’re just moving up toward the next stage of the national battle over flavored seltzer.”

If everyone who read the articles and like it, that would be favorable to have your donations – Thank you.

How to Minimize the Risk of Food Poisoning – Chiara Zarmati

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Marketing, Foods & Drinks, Health/Diet Plan, Health/Hygienic, Health/Medicine NewsLeave a comment

The year is not yet half over and already there have been seven documented multistate outbreaks of food poisoning. The latest involved eggs in their shells containing salmonella and packaged chopped romaine lettuce contaminated with the especially dangerous “hamburger bug” E. coli O157:H7.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the romaine outbreak involved 172 people sickened across 32 states, with one death.

The other outbreaks so far this year, all involving salmonella, were traced to dried coconut, chicken salad, an herbal supplement called kratom, raw sprouts and frozen shredded coconut. Last year, there were eight multistate outbreaks, and in 2016, there were 14.

With summer and its accompanying picnics and outdoor food fests fast approaching, more outbreaks are likely to mar the fun of unsuspecting diners this year. We live in a global food economy and most people purchase and consume foods produced thousands of miles away that are often packaged in bulk to simplify food preparation at home and in restaurants.

Meat, poultry and fish may come from huge farms where hundreds of thousands of animals are raised together, increasing the chance that food poisoning organisms will spread widely before they are detected.

More than 40 million cases and 3,000 deaths are estimated to result from food poisoning in this country each year. One person in six is typically sickened each year, according to the C.D.C., and the problem is getting worse.

Cases are no longer mainly tied to foods made with raw eggs (like homemade mayonnaise and eggnog) or undercooked meat and poultry. Harmful organisms now show up in foods that were not considered a problem years ago, like raspberries, cantaloupe, ice cream, salami, scallions, parsley, apple cider and even toasted oat cereal.

You can protect yourself up to a point if you take proper precautions with the foods you purchase. Most important: Keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold. If a food is meant to be refrigerated, don’t keep it at temperatures above 40 degrees Fahrenheit any longer than it takes you to get from store to home — an hour or two at most. In hot weather or a sun-drenched vehicle, transport the food in an ice-filled cooler or insulated bag.

Once home, store the foods safely. Never place raw meat, poultry or fish in the fridge where it can drip onto other foods, especially foods already cooked and fresh fruits and vegetables that may be consumed raw.

Don’t defrost frozen foods on the counter. Take them out of the freezer in ample time for them to thaw in the fridge or use a microwave oven with a defrost feature.

Food safety experts advise against rinsing raw meat, poultry and fish in the sink; it risks spreading noxious organisms on surfaces that will later come into contact with foods eaten raw. However, produce can and should be washed even if you plan to peel or cook it unless it comes in a package labeled triple-rinsed or ready to use. Rinsing, again, risks cross-contamination.

Be doubly sure to wash melons, especially cantaloupe and others with rough skins, before cutting into them lest you transfer nasty organisms from the surface of the fruit to the flesh within. But experts do not recommend using soap or bleach on foods.

Don’t assume that because the food was locally grown or from a farmers’ market, it’s free of potential hazards. Large producers operate under strict rules to prevent contamination; small local farmers may not adhere to the same constraints.

Before preparing to cook, use soap and warm water to wash your hands, under your nails and up to your wrists. Use a commercial cleanser or a solution of one teaspoon of bleach in a quart of water to clean kitchen surfaces.

When prepping foods, use separate cutting boards and knives for raw animal foods and produce, even produce you plan to cook, or wash the equipment thoroughly with soapy water between the two.

Always refrigerate foods that are being marinated, even if the marinade is acidic. Never use the same marinade on the food after it has been cooked — unless you boil it first for 10 minutes — and don’t reuse it to marinate something else.

Cook animal products to the proper temperature: 160 degrees for ground meat; 165 for poultry; 145 for pork and fin fish; until the flesh is opaque for most shellfish, and until shells open for clams, oysters and mussels. After a food is cooked, put it on a clean platter.

If you’re hosting a buffet and expect prepared or raw food to remain unrefrigerated for hours, use a portable burner (like a chafing dish) to keep hot foods hot and set those that should be cold over crushed ice.

But no matter how carefully you handle food at home, it is difficult if not impossible to reduce your risk of food poisoning if you rely heavily on restaurant-prepared and takeout foods. All it takes is one food handler along the line who harbors a noxious organism and fails to take needed precautions against contaminating the food being prepared and served.

You may be able, however, to help protect others. If you have good reason to suspect a particular source of your resultant misery, you may curb its spread and prevent others from getting sick by reporting your experience as soon as possible to your local health department and the establishment where you purchased or consumed the food.

That said, pinpointing the cause of a food poisoning incident can be very tricky. It may — or may not — originate with the last food or drink you consumed. Different organisms take varying amounts of time to produce symptoms that might be recognized as food poisoning, and the “transit time” it takes for food to make its way through the digestive tract varies from person to person.

For example, while an attack of Staphylococcus aureus typically occurs in two to four hours after consuming a contaminated food, it can take as long as two days for a norovirus or Yersinia infection to cause misery, and E. coli O157:H7 can take up to 10 days before it results in bloody diarrhea and possible kidney failure.

And if you want to know how efficient your digestive tract usually is, eat a cob of corn and notice how long it takes before undigested kernels appear in your stool. This could help you pinpoint the source of a suspected food poisoning attack.

Also, while the most common symptoms of food poisoning include vomiting and diarrhea, several organisms — shigella, Yersinia and Clostridium perfringens — only cause diarrhea, and a severe infection with Listeria monocytogenes involves mainly fever. A hospital-based lab may be able to quickly identify the cause with a DNA test on a stool sample.

If everyone who read the articles and like it , that would be favorable to have your donations – Thank you

How to Stop Eating Sugar – David Leonhardt

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Marketing, Foods & Drinks, Health/Diet Plan, Health/Obesity, Healthcare Study, Nutrition Facts/News, Nutrition Plans/StrategiesLeave a comment

The first thing to know: Added sugars, of one kind or another, are almost everywhere in the modern diet. They’re in sandwich bread, chicken stock, pickles, salad dressing, crackers, yogurt and cereal, as well as in the obvious foods and drinks, like soda and desserts.

The biggest problem with added sweeteners is that they make it easy to overeat. They’re tasty and highly caloric but they often don’t make you feel full. Instead, they can trick you into wanting even more food. Because we’re surrounded by added sweeteners — in our kitchens, in restaurants, at schools and offices — most of us will eat too much of them unless we consciously set out to do otherwise.

How Did We Get Here?

It’s not an accident. The sugar industry has conducted an aggressive, decades-long campaign to blame the obesity epidemic on fats, not sugars. Fats, after all, seem as if they should cause obesity. Thanks partly to that campaign, sugar consumption soared in the United States even as people were trying to lose weight. But research increasingly indicates that an overabundance of simple carbohydrates, and sugar in particular, is the No. 1 problem in modern diets. Sugar is the driving force behind the diabetes and obesity epidemics. Fortunately, more people are realizing the harms of sugar and cutting back.

What to Cut

Health experts recommend that you focus on reducing added sweeteners — like granulated sugar, high fructose corn syrup, honey, maple syrup, stevia and molasses. You don’t need to worry so much about the sugars that are a natural part of fruit, vegetables and dairy products. Most people don’t overeat naturally occurring sugars, as Marion Nestle of New York University says. The fiber, vitamins and minerals that surround them fill you up.

A typical adult should not eat more than 50 grams (or about 12 teaspoons) of added sugars per day, and closer to 25 is healthier. The average American would need to reduce added-sweetener consumption by about 40 percent to get down to even the 50-gram threshold. Here’s how you can do it — without spending more money on food than you already do.

The Gameplan

Changing your diet is hard. If your strategy involves thinking about sugar all the time — whenever you’re shopping or eating — you’ll likely fail. You’ll also be miserable in the process. It’s much more effective to come up with a few simple rules and habits that then become second nature. (One strategy to consider: Eliminate all added sugars for one month, and then add back only the ones you miss. It’s easier than it sounds.)

Above all, most people’s goal should be to find a few simple, lasting ways to cut back on sugar. Once you’re done reading this guide, we suggest you choose two or three of our ideas and try them for a few weeks.

Eliminate soda from your regular diet. Just get rid of it. If you must, drink diet soda. Ideally, though, you should get rid of diet soda, too.

That may sound extreme, but sweetened beverages are by far the biggest source of added sugar in the American diet — 47 percent, according to the federal government. Soda — along with sweetened sports drinks, energy drinks and iced teas — is essentially flavored, liquefied sugar that pumps calories into your body without filling you up. Among all foods and beverages, says Kelly Brownell, an obesity expert and dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke, “the science is most robust and most convincing on the link between soft drinks and negative health outcomes.”

Get this: A single 16-ounce bottle of Coke has 52 grams of sugar. That’s more added sugar than most adults should consume in an entire day.

As for diet soda, researchers aren’t yet sure whether they’re damaging or harmless. Some scientists think diet soda is perfectly fine. Others, like the Yale cardiologist Dr. Harlan Krumholz, think it may be damaging. Dr. Krumholz recently announced that after years of pounding diet sodas, he was giving them up. There is reason to believe, he wrote, that the artificial sweeteners they contain lead to “weight gain and metabolic abnormalities.”

The Soda Alternative

Many people who think they’re addicted to soda are attracted to either the caffeine or the carbonation in the drink. You can get caffeine from coffee and tea (lightly sweetened or unsweetened), and you can get carbonation from seltzer, flavored or otherwise.

For many people, the shift to seltzer, club soda or sparkling water is life changing. It turns hydration into a small treat that’s still calorie-free. Buy yourself a seltzer maker, as I have, and gorge on the stuff at home, while saving money. Or buy fizzy water in cans or bottles. Sales of carbonated water have more than doubled since 2010, with the brand LaCroix now offering more than 20 different flavors, all without added sugar.

If they’re not sweet enough for you, you can also add a dash of juice to plain seltzer. But many people find that they lose their taste for soda after giving it up. And many Americans are giving it up: Since the late 1990s, sales of full-calorie soda have fallen more than 25 percent.

Breakfast Strategies

There are two main strategies to ensure that breakfast doesn’t become a morning dessert. The first is for people who can’t imagine moving away from a grain-based breakfast, like cereal or toast. If you fall into this category, you have to be quite careful, because processed grains are often packed with sugar.

A few grain-based breakfasts with no or very low sugar:

Cheerios. They’re quite low in sugar.
Plain oatmeal. Flavor it with fresh fruit and, if necessary, a small sprinkling of brown sugar.
Bread. A few breads have no sugar (like Ezekiel 4:9 Whole Grain). A longer list of brands have only one gram, or less, per slice (including Sara Lee Whole Wheat and Nature’s Own Whole Wheat). Authentic Middle Eastern breads, like pita and lavash, are particularly good options and a growing number of supermarkets sell them.
Homemade granola. You can also make your own granola and play around with the sugar amounts.

But there is also a more creative alternative. Move away from grain-based breakfasts. If you do that (as I have recently, after decades of eating cereal), avoiding added sugar is easy. My new breakfast routine actually feels more indulgent than my old one. Most days, I eat three or four of the following:

Scrambled or fried eggs
Fruit
Plain yogurt
A small piece of toast
A few nuts
A small portion of well-spiced vegetables, like spinach, carrots and sweet potatoes.

If everyone who reads our articles and likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure by your donations – Thank you.

Forgetting the Madeleine

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Marketing, Cooking Training, Food Business, Food Recipes, Foods & DrinksLeave a comment

A pastry chef reflects on taste, memory, and literature’s most famous confection.

via Forgetting the Madeleine — Longreads

Why Asparagus Makes Your Urine Smell

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Marketing, Foods & Drinks, Health/Medicine Innovations, Health/Medicine News, Healthcare Study, Vegetables/PlantsLeave a comment

If you’ve ever noticed a strange, not-entirely-pleasant scent coming from your urine after you eat asparagus, you’re definitely not alone.

Distinguished thinkers as varied as Scottish mathematician and physician John Arbuthnot (who wrote in a 1731 book that “asparagus…affects the urine with a foetid smell”) and Marcel Proust (who wrote how the vegetable “transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume”) have commented on the phenomenon.

Even Benjamin Franklin took note, stating in a 1781 letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels that “A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour” (he was trying to convince the academy to “To discover some Drug…that shall render the natural Discharges of Wind from our Bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreable as Perfumes”—a goal that, alas, modern science has still not achieved).

But modern science has, at least, shed some light on why this one particular vegetable has such an unusual and potent impact on the scent of urine. Scientists tell us that the asparagus-urine link all comes down to one chemical: asparagusic acid.

Asparagusic acid, as the name implies, is (to our knowledge) only found in asparagus. When our bodies digest the vegetable, they break down this chemical into a group of related sulfur-containing compounds with long, complicated names (including dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, dimethyl sulfoxide and dimethyl sulfone). As with many other substances that include sulfur—such as garlic, skunk spray and odorized natural gas—these sulfur-containing molecules convey a powerful, typically unpleasant scent.

All of these molecules also share another key characteristic: They’re volatile, meaning that have a low enough boiling point that they can vaporize and enter a gaseous state at room temperature, which allows them to travel from urine into the air and up your nose. Asparagusic acid, on the other hand, isn’t volatile, so asparagus itself doesn’t convey the same rotten smell.

But once your body converts asparagusic acid into these volatile, sulfur-bearing compounds, the distinctive aroma can be generated quite quickly—in some cases, it’s been detected in the urine of people who ate asparagus just 15-30 minutes earlier.

Of course, the whole asparagus-urine scent issue is complicated by an entire separate issue: Some people simply don’t smell anything different when urinate after they eat asparagus. Scientists have long been divided into two camps in explaining this issue.

Some believe that, for physiological reasons, these people (which constitute anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the population) don’t produce the aroma in their urine when they digest asparagus, while others think that they produce the exact same scent, but somehow lack the ability to smell it.

On the whole, the evidence is mixed. Initially, a pair of studies conducted in the 1980s with participants from France found that everyone produced the characteristic scent, and that a minority of people were simply unable to smell it. People with the ability to detect the scent, though, were able to smell it even in the urine of those who couldn’t smell it, indicating that the differences were rooted in perception, not production.

More recent studies, though, suggest the issue is a bit more complicated. The most recent study, from 2010, found that differences existed between individuals in both the production and detection of the scent.

Overall, scientists now conclude that most of the difference is in perception—that is, if your urine doesn’t seem to smell any differently after you eat asparagus, it’s likely that you simply can’t perceive the sulfurous compounds’ foul odor, but there’s a small chance it’s because your body digests asparagus in a way that reduces the concentration of these chemicals in your urine.

It’s still unclear why some people don’t produce the smell, but we do seem to have a clear explanation of why some people don’t perceive it. In 2010, the genetic sequencing company 23andMe conducted a study in which they asked nearly 10,000 customers if they noticed any scent in their urine after eating asparagus, and looked for genetic similarities among those who couldn’t.

This peculiarity—which you might consider useful if you eat asparagus frequently—appears to stem from a single genetic mutation, a switched base-pair among a cluster of 50 different genes that code for olfactory receptors.

We’re still waiting for some enterprising team of scientists to attempt gene therapy to convert smellers into non-smellers—but given other priorities to use genetic modification to cure blindness and breast cancer, it seems likely that those suffering from asparagus-scented urine might have to wait a while.

If everyone who reads our articles and likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $5, you can donate us – Thank you.

DNA From Ancient Latrines Reveal What People Ate Centuries Ago

On By marketingscoopsIn Ancient History/Civilization, Content Marketing, Culture/Art, Foods & Drinks, ScienceLeave a comment

There’s treasure to be found in mining excrement. At least, it’s treasure to scientists studying the diets, habits and health of people who lived centuries ago.

In a new study, Danish researchers dug up old latrines and sequenced the DNA they found in the ancient poop. The results paint a picture of diets and parasites spanning times and places that range from an ancient fort Qala’at al-Bahrain, near the capital Bahrain in 500 B.C.E. to the river-ringed city of Zwolle in the Netherlands in 1850. The researchers published their results in the journal PLOS One.

The team collected samples of old latrines and soil deposits at eight different archeological sites. They screened the samples for the eggs of parasites, which can last for centuries, and analyzed the DNA in each sample to determine species. They also gleaned the DNA of plants and animals from the samples to determine what people ate.

In some ways, the team found that life centuries ago was unhygienic as might be imagined. Most people probably dealt with intestinal parasites at least once in their life, veterinary scientist and paper co-author Martin Søe, with the University of Copenhagen, tells Angus Chen at NPR. “I think it’s fair to say it was very, very common,” he says. “In places with low hygienic standards, you still have a lot of whipworm and round worm.”

Søe explains that the types of parasites they found could also give insight into the animals people consumed. Parasites that live in fish and pigs but that can also infect humans were a common find, indicating that undercooked or raw pork and fish was a diet staple.

The analysis also identified a handful of parasites that only infect humans such as the giant roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides) and the whipworm (Trichuris trichiura).

By sequencing the mitochondrial DNA of the parasite eggs, the researchers found that Northern European whipworms from 1000 C.E. to 1700 C.E. were more closely related to worms found in present-day Uganda than to those in present-day China. Findings like this offer “hints about ancient patterns of travel and trade,” writes Charles Choi for a blog post at Discover magazine.

Researchers also found parasites that don’t infect human but are more commonly found in sheep, horses, dogs, pigs and rats. This suggests the critters all likely lived near the latrines, leading people to dispose of the animal waste in the ancient toilets, Søe tells Choi.

The menagerie of ancient DNA helps paint a picture of life at some of the sites. For example, samples from Gammel Strand—a site in Copenhagen’s old harbor—include DNA from herring and cod, horses, cats and rats. The harbor was ”[l]ikely a very dirty place by our standards, with a lot of activity from humans and animals,” Søe says.

The findings also reveal information about ancient diets. DNA in Danish samples shows that the people probably ate fin whales, roe deer and hares, writes Sarah Sloat for Inverse. The study also delves into the analysis of plant DNA, which included cherries, pears, cabbages, buckwheat and other edible plants. The ancient Danes’ waste had an abundance of DNA from hops, showing the people’s fondness for beer, whereas the samples from the Netherlands showed people there had a preference for wine.

This isn’t the first time that scientists have looked to unappetizing leavings to learn more about the past. Researchers have traced the path of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by looking for traces of mercury in the soil. The metallic element was in pills the men took to treat constipation and its presence indicates where the expedition dug latrines and camped. And parasites in a castle latrine in Cyprus attest to the poor health endured by crusaders. But the DNA analysis of the new study offers a uniquely detailed picture of the past.

Together, the new findings offer intriguing hints about ancient life. Following up on some of these leads could lead future researchers to tell us more about ancient people’s health and the migrations of our ancestors. As Maanasa Raghavan, a zoologist at Cambridge University who wasn’t part of the new study, tells NPR: “Having these datasets will help us look further at how these pathogens evolved over time or how people moved around.”
If everyone who reads our articles and likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $5, you can donate us – Thank you.

25 Tasty and Healthy Kids’ Lunch Ideas for Home or School

On By marketingscoopsIn Child Care, Content Marketing, Food Business, Food Recipes, Foods & Drinks, Health/Diet PlanLeave a comment

If your kids are picky eaters, you know that every meal can be a battle. Their growing bodies are in need of vitamins and nutrients, yet all they crave are unhealthy foods with no nutritional content. What you need are creative meal ideas they can eat for lunch at home or at school, designed to appeal to their palate.

The recipes listed here contain lots of vegetables, minimal or no processed ingredients, and most importantly, flavors that even the pickiest kids will love! The ingredients for each meal are listed below. Click on the name of the dish to see the full recipe!

Finger Foods

1. Asian-Style Fish Cakes with Sweet Chili Dipping Sauce

Do you have a finicky eater that refuses to eat fish? This is a great way to make this omega-3 fatty acid rich protein appealing and fun to eat. And it’s much better for you than frozen fish sticks.

Just so you know, these fish cakes freeze amazingly well! To save time, make a big batch and freeze them for whenever you need a quick meal or snack.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Finger Foods

1. Asian-Style Fish Cakes with Sweet Chili Dipping Sauce

2. Chicken Zucchini Poppers

3. Baked Crispy Chicken Fingers with Apple Fries

4. Broccoli and Cheese Nuggets (Vegetarian)

The Salad Bar

5. Chicken Taco Salad

6. Chicken Salad with Grapes

7. Salad Stuffed Pepper Bowls with Creamy Avocado Dressing (Vegan)

Soup of the Day

8. Vegan Chili

9. Chicken Pot Pie Soup

10. Slow Cooker Taco Soup

Oodles of Noodles

11. Baked Eggplant Parmesan Penne

12. Roasted Chicken and Tomato Pesto Spaghetti Florentine

13. Thai Noodle Salad (Vegan)

14. Southwest Pasta Salad (Vegetarian)

15. Avocado Hummus Pasta (Vegan)

Some Assembly Required

16. French Bread Pizza

17. Rainbow Pizza

18. Asian Lettuce Wraps

19. Fish Tacos

20. Skirt Steak Fajitas

No Utensils Needed

21. Avocado Egg Salad Wraps

22. Spicy Tuna Avocado Wrap

23. Chicken and Avocado Roll-Ups

24. White Bean Veggie Burgers (Vegan)

25. Turkey Spinach Slider

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: