Blogs / Discoblog

At Discoblog, we do our best to keep the party going. So, even as we lurch back into existence after St. Paddy’s celebrations, we are looking forward to our next big party–which just might be the iPad launch party next month. So, here’s an idea for Apple-themed party food, courtesy Chef Ken at The Cooks Den.

There’s nothing like a cheese plate to make an occasion feel festive. For this recipe, you will need:

* 1 Steve Jobs Cheese Head
* Assorted gourmet cheeses such as brie, camembert or stilton
* Crackers
* Fruit

Oh! You’re not familiar with the culinary marvel known as the Steve Jobs Cheese Head? Forgive us. Chef Ken created this perfectly crafted head of the Apple CEO from a block of mozzarella; the chef thinks mozzarella works best, since the color of the cheese matches His Steveness’s pasty white pallor. It’s pretty simple to create this cheesy replica of a Jobs head. For step-by-step instructions, go here.

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The Web site for POM pomegranate juice makes some pretty extreme claims, strongly implying that the juice can prevent or help treat diseases like cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and even erectile dysfunction. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has said such claims are misleading and are not allowed on food products, according to a report in The New York Times. If POM wants to make such claims, the FDA stated, it will have to be regulated as a drug.

In a crackdown on companies with misleading labels, the FDA shot off warning letters asking 17 companies to clean up their act.

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I scream, you scream, we all scream… for the medicine given to recovering cancer patients.

The Scientist reports that LactoPharma, (a “collaborative research venture between the University of Aukland, the New Zealand government, and the country’s largest dairy company, Fonterra Ltd.”) has created a therapeutic, strawberry-flavored ice cream called ReCharge.

ReCharge ice cream has gone through a string of taste-tests to ensure that the product satisfies the palette. However, one ingredient is a mandatory keeper: Lactoferrin, a protein found in milk that possesses the power to impede tumor growth and improve intestinal immune response. Because side effects of chemotherapy include the destruction of neutrophils (while blood cells) and intestinal cells, which often leads to infection and digestive problems, University of Auckland biologist Geoff Krissansen decided to test bovine lactoferrin on chemotherapy patients to see whether it could counter these side effects.

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Ever wonder why buffalo wings always smell so awesome when a football game is blaring in the room? Scientists have proposed that the way food smells could possibly be related to the sounds we hear when we consume them.

They note that there could be a connection between smell and sound, a hybrid sense they call “smound.” The theory is  in findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Daniel Wesson made the possible neural connection quite by accident when he was studying the olfactory tubercle, a structure at the base of the brain that aids odor detection. He was observing mice when he put his coffee mug down. The clunk of the mug hitting the desk produced a spike in the mice’s olfactory tubercle activity.

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Pediatricians have declared that the trusty ol’ hot dog is in need of a makeover, setting the stage for one of the biggest engineering challenges known to man and causing some to worry, “Is it the end of the hot dog as we know it?”

The cylindrical sausage has been deemed a choking hazard by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which published an official statement on choking risks in the journal Pediatrics that included concerns about the snack clogging a child’s wind pipe. The pediatricians pointed out that 17 percent of all food-related asphyxiations among children are caused by hot dogs.

Talking about the proposal for a choke-proof hot dog, a doctor explains to USA Today:

“If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, it would be a hot dog,” says statement author Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “I’m a pediatric emergency doctor, and to try to get them out once they’re wedged in, it’s almost impossible.”

But Smith admitted that he doesn’t know how the sausage could be redesigned to be safer, adding somewhat lamely that he’s “certain that some savvy inventor will find a way.”

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Fat is normally not a word associated with anorexics, but researchers at the Children’s Hospital Boston suggest that people who suffer from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa have some fat stashed away in a surprising place. They may not have a thick layer of fleshy insulation like people with regular amounts of fat, but anorexics do store fat in their bone marrow–with detrimental results. The findings will be published in the February issue of Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

In the study, researchers took MRI scans of the knees of 40 girls, half of whom were anorexic and the other half healthy. The average age of these girls was 16. Radiologists who studied the MRIs found that girls with anorexia had very high fat content in their knees and less than half as much healthy red marrow.

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The poor potato seems to be suffering from an identity crisis. Particularly in the United Kingdom, where there seems to be a great deal of confusion among consumers over whether the potato is a vegetable or just a starchy carbohydrate or both.

In order to vanquish this confusion and get people to pile on the potatoes, The Potato Council in the U.K. has put forth a petition to Downing Street to re-classify the spud as a “supercarb”–a new food group that, according to the council’s website, would help highlight “how much goodness potatoes contain.”

The Council hope this re-branding restores the potatoes tattered image that has suffered in the hands of those health-conscious folks who believe that a carb is a four-letter word.

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You’ve seen this ad before.

Weight loss program Jenny Craig’s spokeswoman, actress Valerie Bertinelli, is hanging out in a gleaming white “lab,” surrounded by guys in thick-framed glasses and lab coats. She gleefully announces that people on the Jenny diet lost two times as much weight as those who were on the other big diet program (read: Weight Watchers). She also claims that the results were an outcome of a “major clinical trial run by serious lab geeks.”

Now, Weight Watchers has lashed back, dragging Jenny to court–alleging that the ad campaign makes “deceptive claims” about its success rate.

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A polymorphism of the ability to smell urinary metabolites of asparagus.

Face it: your pee smells after you eat asparagus. (And if you think yours doesn’t, it’s because you can’t smell it.) This phenomenon (which is caused by various malodorous sulfur-containing compounds) has tickled the fancies of many researchers, as well as such luminaries as Proust, who wrote of asparagus: “exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, and whose precious essence when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like a fairy-play by Shakespeare) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume (translated from Du côté de chez Swann, Gallimard, 1988, I, 119; I, 131).

But our favorite allusion to the asparagus-pee phenomenon has to be from Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1871 1781, wrote a letter asking researchers to come up with a solution to fart smells (the letter is definitely worth reading in full: To the Royal Academy of Farting):

“Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?”

So, now that we understand why our pee stinks when we eat asparagus, can we address Benjamin’s larger concern? Check back tomorrow for some cutting-edge research on fart-smell-reduction!

Surprise, surprise…. Fast food restaurants might be lying to your face.

According to the Los Angeles Times health blog, Booster Shots:

Researchers from Tufts University took commercially prepared foods — both prepackaged and from restaurants — and analyzed them in a bomb calorimeter. The measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated, and foods from 29 restaurants (both fast-food and sit-down venues) were on average 18% more than reported.

The most egregious offender? Denny’s, whose dry toast is advertised to contain 92 calories but actually packs a diet-busting 283 calories! If they can’t even get the numbers on toast right, just imagine the true caloric content of one of their Grand Slamwiches.

So if your New Year’s resolution includes getting back in shape, help yourself out by resolving to stop eating fast food and frozen meals all together.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Food Fraud: High Schoolers Use DNA Tests to Expose Fake Caviar
Discoblog: Fiber-Filled, Antioxidant-Packed Ice Cream—Brilliant? Sacrilegious? Nasty?
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?

Image: flickr / fotographix.ca