A feast cooked up has revealed singlet oxygen, an oxidant, indoors. Oxidants can be beneficial -- ozone in the stratosphere is one example -- but can also cause stress to our lungs, contributing to the development of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease in the long term ..read more

The inventors of a suite of tests that enable food packages to signal if their contents are contaminated are working to bring producers and regulators together to get their inventions into commercial products, with the goal of preventing illness and reducing food waste ..read more

After-care food and drink accounted for about 22% of the day's added sugar and about one-third of the sweet and salty snack foods the children ate, according to a new study ..read more

Cranberry extracts appear to improve intestinal microbiota and help prevent chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. The study reported beneficial effects after only four days of use ..read more

Researchers have discovered a new mechanism of oil biosynthesis and found a way to genetically engineer a type of test plant to more efficiently produce different kinds of seed oil that it otherwise wouldn't make. While the engineering is proof-of-concept, this discovery could lead to improved production of valuable oils used in food and by a range of industries. The modified plant overcame metabolic bottlenecks and produced significant amounts of an oil similar to castor oil that it doesn't naturally produce ..read more

For most people, biting into a lemon would leave them puckered up and desperate to lose that sour flavor, but a new study revealed that roughly one in eight adults like intensely sour sensations. The cross-cultural study demonstrated there is a subset of 'sour likers' who enjoy exceptionally sour foods ..read more

It has long been thought that meat played an important role in the diet of hunter-gatherers before the Neolithic transition. However, due to the scarcity of well-preserved human remains from Paleolithic sites, little information exists about the dietary habits of pre-agricultural human groups. A new study challenges this notion by presenting compelling isotopic evidence of a strong preference for plants among 15,000-year-old hunter-gatherers from Morocco. This is the first time a significant amount of plant consumption has been measured for a pre-agricultural population, shedding new light on ..read more

Greening the way we eat needn't mean going vegetarian. A healthy, more realistic solution is to adopt a flexitarian diet where seafoods add umami to 'boring' vegetables. A gastrophysicist puts mathematical equations to work in calculating the umami potential of everything from seaweed and shrimp paste to mussels and mackerel ..read more

Scientists have successfully replaced half of the fishmeal protein in the diets of farmed Asian seabass with a 'single cell protein' cultivated from microbes in soybean processing wastewater, paving the way for more sustainable fish farming practices ..read more

New research has highlighted the profound link between dietary choices and brain health ..read more