Posts Tagged: diet

Hackathon movement connects consumers to food

On a Friday evening in a San Francisco conference room, food and technology leaders – including nutrition expert Carl Keen, a UC Davis professor affiliated with the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Ag Experiment Station – spoke to a mixed audience on the need for innovation in adapting populations across the world to changing food systems.

In the crowd, one inspired undergraduate student from UC Davis thumbed together some notes on his phone. The next day he stood in front of everyone at the event – more than 250 in all – and pitched his newly formed idea for a nutrition app.

It drew a small team: a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a UC Davis nutritionist and a UC Berkeley student. Over the next 40 hours they developed a software application that matches safe foods to patient medications. With the final presentations Sunday evening, the judges announced the winners.

Their project, called Took that? Eat this., won first place at the 2015 Food Hackathon. They now have sponsors and are developing their idea into a real consumer product. They are also flying out to the World Expo in Milan, Italy, in September – the first devoted to food and where an even larger food-themed hackathon will take place.  

(Food Hackathon from FounderLY on Vimeo) 

Breaking down the silos 

“It's powerful how much happens in such a short period of time,” says Bob Adams, innovation adviser for the UC Davis World Food Center and a mentor for the hackathon teams. “It was a great experience for all the UC Davis students who participated, because they don't normally interact in projects with students from other programs.”

With nearly 9,000 total hours spent in developing the 18 different projects, the hackathon was declared by the organizers a success and a testament to the power of crowd sourcing.

A group of passionate techies, foodies, scholars, investors and entrepreneurs shut in a room for two days pushed them like never before to apply their diverse expertise toward tackling some of the biggest problems facing food and ag. 

A university connecting ag and nutrition 

Research and industry leaders are looking to this model as one way to seed California's innovation ecosystem across the state's agricultural horizons. As another example, Mars, Inc., which co-sponsored the hackathon, is investing in a new type of university-industry partnership with UC Davis and the World Food Center by establishing the Innovation Institute for Food and Health.

“All of us win from these new and needed collective investments in innovation in food, agriculture and health,” writes Mars chief scientist Harold Schmitz in a recent Sacramento Bee op-ed.

Howard-Yana Shapiro, also a Mars chief scientist and a UC Davis fellow, sees innovative food technology projects like those crafted at the hackathon as this decade's biggest investment arena.

“The next, larger human generation will face food challenges ranging from climate change and water stress to growing demands for upmarket foods,” he wrote in a LinkedIn article. “But from what I saw at the hackathon, the next generation is on it.” 

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See the original story by the UC Davis World Food Center.

Paleo diet not as simple as it sounds

Around the Internet, on TV talk shows and in some fitness centers, people are touting a new weight-loss trend – the Paleolithic diet. Proponents suggest the modern Stone Age nutrition plan mirrors the diet on which humans evolved over millions of years. Adherents swear off farmed foods like wheat, dairy, sugar and legumes and rely on a hunter-gatherer menu of meat, nuts, fruit and vegetables.

“The Paleo Diet is a lifestyle based on the idea that in the past 40,000 years, our DNA has changed very little,” says the Dr. Oz Show website. “Therefore, eating processed foods like cereals, dairy products, and refined sugars invite disease and weight gain.”

When new diet fads hit the airwaves, UC Cooperative Extension’s nutrition educators hear questions. The nutrition educators are in schools, neighborhood centers, community gardens and health fairs teaching the evidence-based Dietary Guidelines for Americans, established by the USDA, to low-income Californians. At an annual training session held this month in Davis, nearly 200 UCCE educators were briefed on the Paleo diet by Sheri Zidenberg-Cherr, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Nutrition at UC Davis.

She said she’s open to new nutrition trends, but has some doubts about copying the dietary habits of our cavemen ancestors.

“After all, they only lived for 15 or 20 years,” Zidenberg-Cherr said. “Dr. Oz is going to say anything to get people excited.”

Ancient diets varied widely by location and historic period, making it difficult to accurately reconstruct eating patterns. And some of the published rationale for the Paleo diet is wrong.

“Scientists have discovered traces of seeds and grains on the teeth of fossilized humans,” she said. “Scientists have discovered remnants of grains on stone cooking tools.”

Zidenberg-Cherr said researchers are now beginning to explore the complex interplay of genes and lifestyle on an individual’s weight and health - a field called epigenetics. Ultimately, the research may one day provide personalized nutrition therapies that maximize genetic potentials, prevent chronic disease and improve treatment outcomes.

Epigenetics might explain the rave reviews by some who have been successful with the Paleo diet.

“Some people feel better when they eat a Paleo diet. It might have metabolic effects. It might improve glucose tolerance. It might be in their minds or it might be epigenetic,” Zidenberg-Cherr said.

The constant drumbeat of diet breakthroughs and fads, however, does tend to confuse the public and erode their confidence in nutrition messages.

“It’s our responsibility as nutrition scientists and educators to act as credible sources of science-based nutrition recommendations,” Zidenberg-Cherr told the UCCE nutrition educators.

Rewards might prevent post-exercise eating

The post-workout binge is so common, according to the Los Angeles Times, scientists have come up with a term for it: compensation. They are now trying to figure out what makes some people compensate while others don't.

In studies of the effects of diet and exercise on body weight, some people who lose a lot of weight, some lose very little weight and some lose none at all. That has led some scientists to believe that exercise might not be a reliable way to lose weight, the Times reported. Exercise seems to stimulate the appetite.

While compensation can be triggered by particularly intense workouts, in most people it appears to be driven by a misunderstanding of how many calories a workout actually burns, a Louisiana State University professor told Times reporter Elena Conis.

"People greatly overestimate how many calories they've burned," the professor was quoted in the article. "Forty-five minutes to an hour on a treadmill only burns 450 calories. You can neutralize it with one coffee and muffin at Starbucks or two glasses of wine that night."

UC Davis nutrition specialist Judith Stern offered suggestions for overcoming compensation, such as working out with a partner.

"It helps to exercise with a friend and eat together afterward, so you can be accountable to each other," Stern was quoted in the Times article. "And if control is hard for you, look for other ways to reward yourself."

The article didn't go into healthful rewards, but I found a few on About.com. Here are some calorie-free rewards for motivating exercise:

• Give yourself an extra ten minutes. At the end of your workout, use that extra time to sit in the hot tub, take an extra long shower, pick up some coffee, stretch, nap or whatever makes you feel good.
• Reward yourself every week. At the end of each week, plan something fun you'll do if you've completed all your workouts. A movie, a massage, a shopping trip, an afternoon in front of the fire, etc.
• Reward yourself every month. Plan bigger rewards for completing all your workouts in one month. A weekend trip, a new pair of running shoes, a day at the spa...choose something that makes you smile when you think about it and get moving.
• Reward yourself at the end of the season. Another way to stay motivated is to plan something for the end of a season, like a vacation. Knowing you have a vacation to look forward to will motivate you to stay in shape so you're strong and ready for your trip.

Exercise motivation can be maintained with rewards.

UC ANR nutrition professor still eats the other white meat

Elena Conis of the Los Angeles Times "Nutrition Lab" was puzzled when pork, billed for years as "the other white meat," was lumped in with beef for a study that linked their high consumption to heart disease and death.

According to Conis' story, the pork industry adopted the white meat slogan after breeding leaner pigs in the 1970s. Scientists, however, generally consider "white" meat to be poultry and "red" meat to come from mammals because saturated fat is generally higher in mammal meat than in fowl.

"If this sounds really confusing, that's because it is," Conis quoted UC Davis nutrition professor Judy Stern. "Heck, I'm confused."

Authors of the new study, which was published in the March Archives of Internal Medicine, haven't nailed down the reason why a diet high in red and processed meats (including pork) was linked to a higher death risk, particularly from heart disease and cancer. They speculated that the association was due to high levels of saturated fat in meat generally, presence of cancer-causing compounds formed in meats cooked at high temperatures, or the fact that people who eat more meat may eat fewer fruits and vegetables, the article said.

Stern told the reporter that she'll still eat pork, but not every day. "Will this study change the way I eat pork? No," she was quoted.

The story also appeared on Newsday.com.

Swine.

'Low carbon diet' reduces food's footprint

Every Tuesday, students at the University of San Francisco are presented with "low carbon" diet choices in the school cafeteria, according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News. Gone is cheese pizza and hamburgers. Such savory treats are being substituted with options that are equally delicious - like guacamole and cucumber relish - but are produced on farms that release less greenhouse gasses than dairies and livestock operations.

USF is one example of institutions looking at changing food consumption to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases floating into earth's atmosphere. According to the article, the United Nations reported in a 2006 publication, "Livestock's Long Shadow," that the livestock sector is responsible for 37 percent of human-caused methane release, which is 23 times more potent a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide. Livestock emit 65 percent of all human-caused nitrous oxide, which is nearly 300 times the potency of carbon dioxide.

Reporter Suzanna Bohen called UC Davis food systems analyst Gail Feenstra to comment on information from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The association's spokeswoman said that critics of beef production's ecosystem effect fail to factor in the environmentally beneficial role of grazing cattle. That includes pastureland absorbing carbon dioxide as it regrows after grazing.

"That's debatable," the article paraphased Feenstra. She is embarking on a project to measure greenhouse gases linked to all aspects of producing agricultural products in California, including feed, fertilizer, energy, transportation and numerous other facets.

Perhaps if cattle were grazing only on unfertilized grasslands, they might provide a net carbon benefit, "however, the proportion of cattle raised in this manner is extremely small," Feenstra was quoted.

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