vitamins – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Stories filed under: "vitamins"
DailyDirt: Healthier Sodas Still Aren't That Healthy
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
It’s not easy to introduce a new soda (or pop or whatever you like to call carbonated soft drinks). Just try to find a bottle of New Coke, Crystal Pepsi, OK Soda or 7Up Gold — and those are just the discontinued sodas that had some significant marketing campaigns behind them. The successful introduction of diet sodas has evolved into a trend toward “healthier” sodas with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, real sugar, no BVO, herbal supplements and all sorts of other ingredients that might provide some kind of health benefit. However, some of these healthy sodas are dying off because consumers don’t seem to want sodas that sound too good for you. Here are just a few examples of healthier sodas you might want to try.
- Pepsi Special is a diet soda that contains dextrin — an indigestible fiber that can make a person feel full and reduce the body’s ability to absorb fat from foods. This beverage has recently been approved for sale in Japan, but it’s not the only soft drink with dextrin on the Japanese market. (NB: drinking a lot of indigestible fiber might keep you in the bathroom for a bit longer than usual…) [url]
- A few years ago, Coke and Pepsi both introduced “healthy” sodas (Diet Coke Plus and Tava, respectively). These carbonated beverages were fortified with vitamins and minerals, but they didn’t quite catch on. [url]
- Coke and Pepsi weren’t the first to try adding vitamins and minerals to soda — in 2004, 7Up Plus hit the shelves a few years before Diet Coke Plus and Tava. 7Up with antioxidants also ran into some problems, and a lawsuit from the Center for Science in the Public Interest made the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group agree to stop adding vitamin E to drinks and claiming to have antioxidant health benefits. [url]
Filed Under: 7up, 7up plus, antioxidants, dextrin, diet coke plus, diet soda, drink, fiber, food, health, minerals, new coke, pepsi special, pop, soda, tava, vitamins
Companies: coca cola, dr pepper snapple group, pepsi
DailyDirt: Take Your Vitamins… Or Not. Who Knows What's Good For You?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
It’s not always simple to know what’s good for your health. We’ve seen that the placebo effect is far more complicated than it seems (or is usually presented) as its effects have grown stronger and stronger over the years across many clinical trials. Doctors themselves aren’t always certain what’s the “best” health advice, and they’re constantly re-evaluating whether current recommendations are actually valid — to develop better recommendations. Here are just a few links on vitamins and some of their (mistaken) benefits.
- Vitamin deficiencies are certainly something to avoid, but some folks are going a bit too far with their vitamins. There is little evidence that antioxidant supplements prevent any kind of disease, but advertisers encourage everyone to take vitamin A and other dietary supplements in vast excess. More is not necessarily better, especially when it comes to vitamins. [url]
- Studies come out all the time that correlate the intake of vitamins with various health benefits, but that’s not supposed to lead us to taking more vitamins. You’re probably not going to suffer from rickets any time soon, so lay off the vitamin D and just go outside occasionally. [url]
- The amount of iron in spinach was mistakenly thought to be much higher than other green vegetables, but spinach actually doesn’t have an extraordinary amount of iron. People also thought that Popeye ate spinach for the iron, but Popeye actually ate spinach for its vitamin A content…. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: antioxidants, dietary supplements, health, iron, placebo effect, popeye, spinach, vitamins
DailyDirt: Eating The Right Stuff
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
We’ve all heard the phrase, “you are what you eat” as advice to avoid junk foods (even ethically-shady foods). It does make some intuitive sense that the foods we consume have a significant impact on our health, but it’s often difficult to separate the fact from fiction for what constitutes heathy eating. There are raw food trends and diet fads to avoid just about any conceivable food category. Here are just a few interesting links on the topic of the things we eat having some rational health benefit.
- Cooking food allowed our ancestors to grow bigger brains since we didn’t have to spend as much energy on hunting and gathering. Big brains need a lot of calories, consuming about 20% of the calories we ingest even though the brain is only about 2% of our body mass. [url]
- There’s a common myth that taking vitamins can produce almost magical health benefits, but more scientific studies are finding that vitamins aren’t necessarily a boon to society. Linus Pauling, the famous chemist who won two Nobel prizes, promoted the idea that vitamin C was particularly beneficial… but the science doesn’t quite back him up. [url]
- Iodine has been added to dietary salt since 1924, originally to prevent goiter, but there’s some evidence that iodine also plays a critical role in brain development. Economists studying the differences between areas of low iodine consumption versus higher iodine intake have found that people in areas that avoided iodine deficiencies have gotten smarter and may explain part of the Flynn Effect (which observes that developed countries saw a rise in IQ scores of 3 points per decade throughout the 20th century). [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: cooking, flynn effect, food, healthy, intelligence, iodine, iq, linus pauling, nutrients, vitamin c, vitamins
DailyDirt: Actually, It *Is* Soylent Green…
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
People eat a lot of weird things, but most folks frown upon cannibalism. Some forms of cannibalism are more socially acceptable than others. Here are just a few examples of people eating other people (or parts of them).
- Ingesting placenta capsules doesn’t sound like a very modern way to get vitamins and nutrients. But there are other ways to eat placentas — dried and powdered, roasted, raw… uh. Yum? [url]
- Three people in Brazil have confessed to murdering and cooking up their victims for food. The murderers actually made empanadas out of their victims and sold them as meals to neighbors. [url]
- Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal, describes how he likes to prepare human flesh for dinner — and insists he’s just a normal guy. Meiwes is also serving a life sentence for killing and eating Bernd Brandes in 2001. [url]
- Two Dutch TV hosts have eaten each other’s surgically-removed flesh. Their meat was cooked, but unseasoned — without fava beans or a nice Chianti sauce. [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: armin meiwes, brazil, cannibalism, food, germany, soylent green, vitamins
DailyDirt: Super Foods… To The Rescue
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
While there are a lot of debates going around about the wisdom of genetically modified organisms, a bunch of food scientists are working with edible concoctions that aren’t GMOs. Traditional breeding of naturally-occurring varieties of fruits and vegetables can still produce some pretty amazing results. And ultimately, consumers are voting with their purchases — which is creating all kinds of food innovations. Here are just a few examples.
- This is a fascinating video on some of the latest in apple breeding — “apples of the future” are on the way! There are apples that don’t brown after their cut, apples that have as much vitamin C as oranges, apple trees that have no branches without pruning, etc. [url]
- The pork technology behind McDonald’s McRib was originally meant to create a faux pork chop. Instead, McDonald’s created a “restructured meat” that took the form of a boneless backrib. [url]
- Super broccoli is a variety of this vegetable that could reduce cholesterol — without any genetic modification. Other super vegetables could have enhanced levels of vitamin D, calcium or omega-3 fatty acids. [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: apples, broccoli, food, gmo, innovation, pork, traditional breeding, vitamins
Companies: cornell, mcdonald's