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In the latest installment of “science ruins your guilty pleasure,” a new report confirms what everyone pretty much already knew–movie popcorn is terrible for you.

Via the Los Angeles Times:

A medium-sized popcorn and medium soda at the nation’s largest movie chain pack the nutritional equivalent of three Quarter Pounders topped with 12 pats of butter, according to a report released today by the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Popcorn from Regal Entertainment Group, AMC and Cinemark, were analyzed in lab. Regal was the worst offender, packing 1,200 calories, 60 grams of saturated fat, and 980 milligrams of sodium into a medium popcorn–before adding butter! The gooey buttery sauce adds 200 calories and 3 grams of saturated fat per 1.5 tablespoons.

Both Regal and AMC pop their popcorn in coconut oil, which is about 90 percent saturated fat, noted the study’s authors. Cinemark uses canola oil, which is healthier, but a medium popcorn from Cinemark will still add around 760 calories and 3 grams of saturated fat to your diet, according to the analysis, which is published in the December issue of CSPI’s Nutrition Action HealthLetter.

On a positive note, no trans-fats were detected in any of the samples.

Apparently, there aren’t any plans to include a low calorie popcorn at any of the movie chains’ snack bars, so if you want healthier options, just do like everyone else and sneak in your own food.

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Image: flickr / jennie-o

What’s the most important scientific research in the world, you ask? Obviously it’s the quest to transform ice cream into a healthy food. Of course, the brain freezing goodness will still be chock full of fat and calories, but hey, toss in some healthy stuff and you can binge guilt-free, right? Right?

Via LiveScience:

In addition to ice-cream’s fat- and calorie-filled ingredients, the researchers hope to add dietary fiber, antioxidants and probiotics (gut bacteria that support a healthy digestive system) to your delectable dessert. Antioxidants could protect cells from damage caused by molecules called free radicals and are suspected of helping to prevent a slew of diseases.

Researchers hope to have a taste-testable prototype within six months, but it may not be entirely delicious; some antioxidant ingredients have a bitter flavor, the researchers note, and adding fiber might give the ice cream a gritty texture. Still, the research team is optimistic they can strike a balance between health and taste, and they hope to have shelf-ready tubs within two years.

Check out the video below of these scientists working in the best laboratory ever.

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The weekend is finally here, and to make sure that you don’t stray off your diet, we’ll leave you with a new video on the science of overeating.

Basically your eyes are your enemy. The evidence lies in a bottomless soup bowl experiment devised by the 2007 Ig Nobel prize winner in Nutrition, Brian Wansink. Participants in the experiment were 73 percent more likely to eat a larger portion of soup if their bowl was imperceptibly refilled as they ate, according to the research titled Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake, published in the journal Obesity.

For Wansink’s take on the results, check out the episode:

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Video: minimovies.org

• ZOMG! U.K. court tweets its ruling against a Twitter impostor.

• Nerds rejoice as “time-telescope” is unveiled, possibly changing the way data is shared on the interwebs.

• Want some light? Cut your finger: New vampire lamp runs on human blood.

• Big brother satellites can spot illegal toxic waste from space.

• Kids that pig out on candy are more likely to be violent adults, says a new correlative study that has enraged sweet tooths everywhere.

So your date this weekend didn’t turn out like you’d hoped. A pint of Ben and Jerry’s  sounds like the perfect remedy, right? But while a bowl of Phish Food might make you feel good now, if a recent study is any indication, the ice cream binge may trick your brain into scarfing high-fat foods for the next several days.

From PhysOrg.com:

Findings from a new UT Southwestern Medical Center study suggest that fat from certain foods we eat makes its way to the brain. Once there, the fat molecules cause the brain to send messages to the body’s cells, warning them to ignore the appetite-suppressing signals from leptin and insulin, hormones involved in weight regulation.

While we’ve known full well that a high-fat diet is bad for you, and that obesity is on the rise, the study’s results helps explain fats’ role in thwarting the hormones that control appetite. One type of fat, palmitic acid—a saturated fatty acid found in foods like butter, cheese, milk and beef—is particularly skilled at shutting your brain up and letting your body eat more. The effect can last up to three days, which is bad news for those trying to watch their weight during beer-and-wing-fueled football weekends.

The study was performed on rats and mice, but the scientists say their results reinforce common dietary recommendations. Next up, the research team wants to investigate how long it takes to rebound from short-term, high- fat intake.

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Image: flickr/stu_spivack

Could part of the solution for global warming fit inside an ice cream cone? Maybe—at least, that’s what the developers of so-called “ambient” ice cream are hoping.

Unilever, the world’s largest ice cream producer (and owner of perhaps the world’s best ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s), is trying to figure out how to produce a new kind of frozen treat that can be shipped and sold at room temperature, before being frozen at home once purchased. The goal is to reduce the carbon that is needed to keep today’s ice cream from turning into a sloppy mess. The Times Online reports:

A spokesman for Unilever said that warm, or so-called ambient, ice cream was a “very interesting idea” but one that posed tough challenges that its scientists were trying to solve. “The key question which has yet to be fully answered is: how do you ensure that, when the ambient ice cream is frozen at home it will have the right microstructure to produce a fantastic consumer experience?”

The new ice cream may be the tastiest part of an overall program to help Unilever cut down on the impact its products, such as dishwashers and refrigerators, have on the environment. Of course, an even bigger way to reduce carbon: Eat less ice cream.

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Image: flickr / lilivanili

We recently covered a study in which every single fish tested from U.S. streams was tainted with mercury. But that may be the least of our worries: The demand for fish will increase by 40 percent in the next two decades. As the world population hits 9 billion by 2050, the continued depletion of biodiversity and poor environmental conditions of the ocean could end up wiping fish completely off our menus. Not surprisingly though, aquaculture is picking up, and now more than 50 percent of the fish that ends up in our bellies was raised in coastal fish farms.

Fish raised in farms near the coastline are exposed to more pollution than wild fish, and therefore grow to be less nutritious. Ideally, we’d like our fish to roam around freely in the sea before we eat them.

Enter MIT’s Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, which is building robotic cages so fish can be farmed in the ocean away from the coastal waters. The Aquapod cage has 8-foot long propellers, which are controlled and powered from a generator in an attached boat. The cage, which strikingly resembles the Apple Store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, is built with triangular panels that are coated in steel nets. National Geographic reports:

“The idea of a cage towing a buoy, with the buoy in radio contact with the shore, is quite feasible,” [director Cliff Goudey said]. “It’s a little futuristic for today’s industry, but we could have a sensor on the cage which gives its heading and a GPS system to report its effective speed over the ground.”

Another group at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory has a more open idea for a “cage”: They allow their fish to swim freely, but train them to return to their cage at the sound of a dinner bell. Granted, fish are hardly terriers: The bell worked for black sea bass for about a week, but when a school of bluefish came to dine on the bass, they refused to return to their cage despite the researchers’ offer of free food.

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Image: flickr/ Swamps

Will showing pictures of cake to dieting women send them running for the Entenmann’s outlet? Or strengthen their resolve to avoid sweets? The answer is option B, according to a study of 54 women out of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. New Scientist reports:

[Study leader Floor] Kroese and her colleagues asked 54 female students to look at a picture of either a slice of chocolate cake or a flower under the guise of a memory test. The researchers then questioned the students about any plans to eat more healthily and offered them a choice between a chocolate or oatmeal cookie.

Women shown the cake picture gave a higher priority to their healthy eating intentions than their counterparts shown the flower. They were also significantly more likely to pick the oatmeal cookie – which earlier tests showed was generally perceived as the healthier option.

Kroese  speculates that in this case, viewing pictures of the objects of their temptation—not the cake itself, mind you, but pics of it—” reminded people of their goal to watch their weight, and helped them act accordingly.” Of course, it’s doubtful that we should start papering billboards with German chocolate cake to curb the obesity epidemic:

Kroese suggests that sticking pictures of tempting foods on the fridge door may help to bring weight-watching goals to mind. But she cautions that the results can only be applied to women wanting to lose weight: it is unclear whether they would hold in the general population.

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Image: iStockphoto

In an effort to encourage its citizens to purchase “greener” food products, Sweden has announced that it allow companies to tack labels onto vegetables, dairy, and fish products if the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the foods have been reduced by at least 25 percent. For example, if a milk producer uses manure instead of chemical-based fertilizers, he’ll receive a “climate-certified” tag to put on his milk.

Unfortunately, while the intentions may be good here, the reality is a bit more complex. Simply slapping a label on something based on a single factor does not mean it is green. New Scientists reports:

“The only thing we’re guaranteeing is that improvements have been made,” says Anna Richert, an adviser to the Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF), and head of the team developing the criteria for labeling products. “This could mean reductions in emissions of anything from 5 to 80 per cent.”

Danielle Nierenberg of Worldwatch Institute, a Washington DC based think tank, says that there is still a shortage of firm figures for emissions produced when growing, processing, shipping, and selling most foods. “Because we don’t have a lot of good scientific data, I think there’s a risk that companies will claim things they can’t back up, and greenwash products that might not be climate friendly,” she says.

Putting labels on green foods might up their sale, but with no scientific way of calculating if a product is climate friendly, these labels will just add noise to the already-crowded label system we have for foods. Remember when consumers ran for anything labeled “fat free”?
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If your everyday ham and bacon have become boring, look no further than the Hungarian Mangalica pig. It’s a rare breed; in fact, 20 years ago, there were fewer than 200 of them left worldwide. But the Hungarian Mangalica has since been bred for food, and in the process, the population has swelled to 20,000 in Hungary and Spain.

The curly-haired oinker needs space to roam and grows very slowly, making it incompatible with modern pig farms. Luckily, other pig-ophiles stepped in to keep the breed afloat. Scientific American reports:

The resurrection of the Mangalica has been the mission of Juan Vicente Olmos, the head of Spain’s Monte Nevado ham company, and geneticist Peter Tóth, who tracked and purchased the last pigs from farms scattered throughout Hungary. After less than two decades of intense breeding, the Mangalica population has now increased one-hundred-fold, with 20,000 pigs living in Spain and Hungary.

Of course, a breed (like the Mangalica) is not a species, so it couldn’t technically go extinct. Still, the salvation of the pig and its unique genes remains a victory. The Mangalica may not be suited to modern commercial livestock production, but it does contain genes that don’t exist elsewhere. Some of those genes make it more suitable to cold, mountainous regions. Who knows when and where those rare genes could be of use?

Keep in mind that rare pork comes at a price: At nearly $55 per pound, an eight-to-10 pound ham will set you back $490.

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Image: flickr / Ken Wilcox.