Middle School teacher review of StarChild Science:

Teach Your Own

7 easy lessons about

nature's energies.

How to talk to your child

about nature's ways.

This one activity can start your child understanding fractions, food science and more.

Watermelon May Have Viagra-effect

...scientists say watermelon has ingredients that deliver Viagra-like effects to the body’s blood vessels and may even increase libido.

Sequencing The Cacao Genome To Safeguard Chocolate

During the past 15 years, the global cocoa industry has confronted a trio of devastating fungal diseases that cost growers an estimated $700 million in losses annually.

The global chocolate market is worth $75 billion annually. Scientists report that the three most important and damaging cacao diseases are black pod, frosty pod, and witches' broom. Black pod occurs worldwide and has the largest impact, while frosty pod and witches' broom are restricted to tropical America.

Putting Meat Back in Its Place

Ever noticed yourself at the grocery store staring down at packages of meat and realizing you throw out a lot of the meat you cook because, for some reason, you just don't eat that much anymore? Do you worry about getting enough protein when this happens?

The Mediterreanean diet is rich in olive oil, grains, fruits, nuts, vegetables, and fish, but low in meat, dairy products and alcohol.

Traditional Mediterranean Diet Protects Against Diabetes, Study Suggests

The major protective characteristics of the diet include a high intake of fibre and vegetable fat, a low intake of trans fatty acids, and a moderate intake of alcohol. In addition, a key element of the diet is the abundant use of virgin oil for cooking, frying, spreading on bread, and dressing salads.

The typical American diet is rich in protein, cereal grains and other acid-producing foods. In general, such diets generate tiny amounts of acid each day.

Plant Foods For Preserving Muscle Mass

With aging, a mild but slowly increasing metabolic "acidosis" develops, according to the researchers.Acidosis appears to trigger a muscle-wasting response. So the researchers looked at links between measures of lean body mass and diets relatively high in potassium-rich, alkaline-residue producing fruits and vegetables.

This is not a petri dish with milky bacteria growing in it. It is a dish of tempe. A new vegetarian dish that is made from grains.

New Vegetarian Food With Several Health Benefits

A new vegetarian food that boosts the uptake of iron and offers a good set of proteins. This could be the result of a doctoral dissertation by Charlotte Eklund-Jonsson at the Department of Food Science in Sweden.

"Tempe is designed for vegetarians, but also for people who want to eat less meat for environmental reasons, for example," says Charlotte Eklund-Jonsson.

studies show that after six months, frozen cherries have lost as much as 50 percent of anthocyanins, the healthful compounds found in the pigment of red and blue fruits and vegetables. Fresh spinach loses 64 percent of its vitamin C after cooking. Canned peas and carrots lose 85 percent to 95 percent of their vitamin C, according to data compiled by the University of California, Davis.

Finding the Best Way to Cook All Those Vegetables

boiling was better for carrots, zucchini and broccoli than steaming, frying or serving them raw. Frying was by far the worst..

Still, there were tradeoffs. Boiling carrots, for instance, significantly increased measurable carotenoid levels, but resulted in the complete loss of polyphenols compared with raw carrots.

If not for the control of one gene, the world might be overrun with giant tomatoes. Cornell University scientists have come to this conclusion through their efforts to understand why the tomatoes we buy in grocery stores are so much larger than those grown in the wild.

Mammoth Tomatoes Arose from Genetic Mutation

The fruits, he says, are "about the size of the tip of your little finger and weigh only 1 to 2 grams ... If you see one of these plants in the wild, the fruits are so inconspicuous that you may not even see them."

"This apparently was a new mutation, [occurring] very recently in terms of evolution, and it made a big impact when humans saw it and selected it," says Tanksley.

Watering Tomato Plants With Diluted Seawater Boosts Levels Of Antioxidants

This is the kind of news every coastal community wants to hear. With the growing shortage of fresh water we are looking closely at our gardens' sosuce of water for growth. It so happens that tomatoes grown in seawater have a higher amount of antioxidants in them than those grown in fresh water. They show a higher level of vitamin C, vitamin E, dihydrolipoic acid, and chlorogenic acid. These are antioxidants found to help protect against heart disease and prostate cancer. Tell your local community garden or the ogranic growers association about this news.

Smitten Kitchen has done it again! Their phtography is exceptional.

Vegetarian casserole using white beans

There's casseroles and then there's casseroles. Some are laden with cheeses that put on the pounds and some are tasteless but healthy. This casserole from Smitten Kitchen in one that uses the healthiest of beans and fresh vegetables that are high in fibre and anti-oxidants. And it is a tasty casserole. When it comes to serving a child a cassesrole of pasta mixed with veggies or canneloni beans and veggies I always opt for the beans becuase they are by far the better source of fibre.

The Science of the Perfect Souffle

Science in the kitchen is largely the chemistry kind — the properties of two liquids mixing, the transformation of bread into toast, the breakdown of starches into sugars. But do you ever think about velocity or gravity in your cooking? It turns out, beating eggs is all about science — and it's physics and chemistry that make a souffle rise or fall.

"What we didn't know then was how incredibly healthy this method was." Judy Wilken MS

June Taylor Company

Berkeley's princess of preserves.

What caught my eye about June Taylor is that the fruit is hand-cut and stove-top cooked in small batches with the addition of a minimal amount of sugar and no commercial pectin. This is how my grandma used to preserve fruits from the local farmers in her small town in Saskatchewan, Canada. We had preserved fruit all winter long.

Kitchen Window

Say It with Chocolate Bread

It's difficult to stop yourself from tearing into chocolate bread the moment you take it out of the oven, but restrain yourself. If you allow the loaf to cool in the pan for 15 minutes and on a rack for another 15, it will hold its shape and be much, much easier to slice. The recipe is adapted from one Godiva Chocolatier once provided.

Chocolate Dough

1 1/2 cups warm water, divided (or, if not using espresso powder, 1/2 cup warm water and 1 cup warm coffee)

2/3 cup plus 1 teaspoon granulated sugar, divided

2 teaspoons dry yeast

4 1/2 cups bread flour

2/3 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

2/3 cup cocoa powder, sifted

1 teaspoon instant espresso powder, optional (see above)

2 teaspoons salt

1 large egg, at room temperature

12 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

8 ounces good-quality dark chocolate, chopped into 1/2-inch chunks

Making Pizza Healthy?

making a whole wheat crusted pizza may increase availability of antioxidants, which may reduce the risk of aging-related chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

When you look closely at the recipe for the crust you can see the lab gang used some healthy ingredients such as honey instead of sugar and whole wheat flour instead of white flour. Looking even closer you realize the rising time for the dough was way beyond normal. Instead of letting the dough rise for a few hours, they put the dough into the refrigerator for 18 hours. This extended time gave the whole wheat dough more time to release its antioxidants. Also, the lab gang baked the pizzas in a hotter oven than usual. All this resulted in a significantly higher antioxidant count.

Antioxidants play an important role in deactivating the free radicals inside the body that cause cellular damage and several deadly diseases. Antioxidants are known to slow and prevent the onset of cancer, and help to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease by deterring the collection of plaque on arterial walls.

Cauliflower creamy soup good for you in many ways!

click on cauliflower graphic to go to Nell Newman's wonderful web site

Cauliflower is sweet if not cooked too long. It is full of nutrients and shows significant protection from breat cancer. In fact, the photonutrient in cauliflower, sulforaphane, lowered the occurance of breast tumors in lab animals by almost 40% in a John's Hopkins Medical School study.

Cauliflower also contains vitamin C and folate. Folate helps the blood work more efficiently and is often recommended for preventing anemia. Folate is also essential for proper tissue growth and not getting enough can make you succeptible to many diseases down the road such as cancer and heart disease.

Nell Newman has a wonderful cauliflower and parmesan soup recipe on her web site Try it. It is outstanding!

Dark chocolate flavonoids reduce high blood pressure

Tea is higher in the type of flavonoid called flavan-3-ols, while cocoa is higher in procyanids. The researchers said that the level of blood-pressure reduction observed in the cocoa studies would be sufficient to reduce the risk of stroke by 20 percent, the risk of coronary heart disease by 10 percent and the overall risk of premature death by 8 percent.

There is just one thing to remember here:

USE MODERATION

Wasting Energy Rather than Dieting

"When you make the mitochondria inefficient, the muscles burn more calories," a metabolic increase that could be at least a partial substitute for exercise, said Clay Semenkovich of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

By making the skeletal muscles of mice use energy less efficiently, researchers report that they have delayed the animals' deaths and their development of age-related diseases, including vascular disease, obesity, and one form of cancer.

Questioning the Value of “Stealth” Nutrition

Don't hide things from a child. Educate the child about vegetables. Plant a garden, even if it's only a few plants. Just the involvement of taking care of a bean plant, a tomato vine or a head of lettuce will be a

wonderfully successful way to get your child into eating veggies.You don't want to hide things from a child. That is not smart. It will come to haunt you somehow in the future. And remember, zealots lie and hide the truth from others. They lie and hide things from children and adults in order to get what they want. Don't become a zealot.

Stealth belongs to the military, not to families. The word 'stealth' is an old word. It originally meant 'stealing' !

Five Easy Ways to Go Organic

Dr. Alan Greene, M.D.

Pediatrician

Some vegetables, like broccoli, asparagus and onions, as well as foods with peels, such as avocados, bananas and oranges, have relatively low levels of pesticide residue compared to other fruits and vegetables. Dr. Greene teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Can this cake from Smitten Kitchen really help you? Oh please say YES!