- Author: Brenda Roche
“Fresh from the Garden” is a “vegetable education” program that was created several years ago by retired LA County Cooperative Extension employee and registered dietitian Susan Giordano. Giordano created lessons to reach home gardeners and their families living with limited resources. The lessons are designed to increase gardeners' knowledge of healthful eating habits, while emphasizing the health benefits associated with a vegetable-rich diet. The lessons also encourage gardeners to grow a greater variety of vegetables, more nutrient-dense vegetables, to cultivate vegetable crops throughout the year, and to prepare their harvest using delicious, nutritious recipes. In recent months, the lessons have been given a makeover...
- Author: Pam Devine
Food blog here, food blog there, food blog everywhere — including this one! The popularity and variety of food blogs has exploded, and proves many of us are little foodies at heart. In doing research for this post, I have to admit, I couldn’t believe what’s out there, especially about cooking. From vegan to Indian to coffee to crock pots to cooking with kids to Asian grandmothers to organic, it’s all there waiting for you.
The popularity and importance of food content is well documented. Last summer, the Huffington Post reported on the results of the July cable news ratings. The Food Network beat out all of the cable news networks - FOX, MSNBC and CNN - in every demographic measurement. This in spite of the fact that...
- Author: John Stumbos
Healthy eating has gotten complicated. Fresh fruits and vegetables pack the produce aisle as never before. And new food products with added health benefits are being introduced all the time. Yet the food supply, and the agricultural system that supports it, has become increasingly criticized for its impact on the waistlines of millions of people in the United States.
“Agriculture and conventional food systems have provided the basis for long and healthy lives, and much of that improvement can be traced to healthier diets,” says UC Davis plant sciences professor Alan Bennett. “At the same time, we are faced with a growing critique that conventional food...
- Author: Colin Bishop
Workers sort tomatoes at Russell Ranch
Part of our mission at the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis is to ensure access to healthy food. So we’ve focused much of our work on the intersection between agriculture and human nutrition.
An interesting new field of study in this area looks at flavonoids, which are compounds in fruits and vegetables thought to have beneficial antioxidant effects and other medicinal value – they may even help reduce cancer risk.
Measuring the amount of flavonoids is one way we can figure out just how...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
There is no evidence to support the claim that farm subsidies -- by making fattening foods relatively cheap and abundant -- contribute to obesity in the United States, according to an analysis led by UC Davis researchers.
"U.S. farm subsidies have many critics. A variety of arguments and evidence can be presented to show that the programs are ineffective, wasteful or unfair," said Julian Alston, a professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis. "Eliminating farm subsidies could solve some of these problems -- but would not even make a dent in America's obesity problem."
According to Alston and his colleagues, farm...