So you know my whole diatribe against fancy-pants PROBIOTIC yogurts and how they’re really not all that different from regular yogurt (both contain friendly bacteria) except for the price?

Well the yogurt manufacturers have gone even further and given yogurt another health boost, but this time with heart and brain-healthy omega 3 fatty acids. For example Yoplait (and organic rival Stonyfield) have added about 16-17 mg of the long chain omega-3 DHA (most abundant in fatty fishes) to each 100 gram-ish pot.

Cool beans, eh? I mean omega 3s are great. They help prevent heart disease, promote good brain development and even out some behavioural problems in kids. They are the miracle food supplement of our age. So we should eat omega-3 fortified EVERYTHING. Totally.

Handily Martek, the company that supplement’s Yoplait’s yogurt with their algae-produced “Life’s DHA” is also adding a bit of non-fishy goodness to lots of things: cereal, milk, soy milk, nutrition bars, eggs, sushi, hamburger, cheese sauce and juice (whole list here). They also recently announced that they will be adding Life’s DHA to whole grain bread in Canada. 

But my problem here is dosing.  There is little consensus over dosing for adults and even fewer recommendations for kids. The experts I have talked to previously (Joe Hibbeln at the NIH) suggest that normal adults need 1 gram - 1000 mg - of DHA and EPA (another long-chain omega 3). And I found one newspaper article quoting a doctor who suggests about 500 mg for kids (and another that says kids over 5 and adults are the same). 

So Junior would have to eat 29 pots of yogurt to meet his daily requirement. Riiiiiiiiiight.

This is pretty fine print here and parents who think they are giving their kids the omega 3 boost they need through yogurt while avoiding the hazards of fish (all that mercury, see) will be mistaken. Unlike vitamins and minerals - that have a recommended daily dose and are listed on nutrition labels as a % of the RDI - there is no such consumer information available for omega 3s.

And while I take fish oil supplements (for a total of about 1200 mg of DHA/EPA daily), the rush to fortify foods with omega 3 always carries a risk...that it takes away from the general healthy eating rules that provide people with natural dietary sources of omega 3s. Eat some fish. Eat some flax.

And let’s not forget that nutrients from WHOLE FOODS almost always seems to carry more potency than refined products. For example, this 2006 Norwegian study found that eating actual fish was better than fish oil in terms of cardiovascular benefits, even though subjects ate the same amount of omega 3 fatty acids.

As far as short cuts go, fish oil pills/DHA supplements are pretty good. But they are still short cuts...and adding a short amount of short cut to your kids yogurt pot will dent your wallet more than it will grow their brains.

(PHOTO: My entirely spiffy and clean keyboard with Anne’s very clean hands)

And from the journal of the bleeding obvious, keyboards are dirty! Probably not your own laptop keyboard (unless you have terrible personal hygeine in which case ew, go wash), but the keyboards on your desk at work. Particularly if you hotdesk. Apparently they’re teeming with grot, grime, and bacteria that make you puke or die. More grot in fact than a loo seat. Yuk. know that I’m pretty clean, but ‘my’ desk is staffed 24 hours a day, and I can’t vouch for the overnight folk. That said, I do tend to eat my lunch at my desk and my lunch usually involves crumbs which can’t be good for the cleanliness of my keyboard. Half of me thinks this story is like that urban myth about London Underground seats being covered in poo and dead rats (more info from Snopes.com), and the other half thinks it’s a good wake up call and an excuse to waste a half hour cleaning up my workstation. And the other half doesn’t want to think about this anymore because it’s rather unsavoury…

(PHOTO: CRAIGPJ)

As I write this, in New Zealand a group of scientists have just arrived at work all ready for their third day of investigating a colossal squid. Said squid was discovered in the Ross Sea over a year ago, and has been waiting to be studied since then. It’s not a job I’d relish, but it’s just fascinating, as the squid is one of the biggest ever found. Very few of this size have been found at all, it’s thought less than 6. One of the only clues that they exist at all was a few massive tentacles found in the tummy of a giant sperm whale in 1925. This one is over 10m long, and is doubly rare becuase it’s in such good condition. ‘Good condition’ beingn a relative concept of course, as the squid consists of half a tonne of cold wet fishy squish.

But the best bit? You can watch the studying the squid live over the interweb! Technology rocks.

PS If the picture of a mega squid makes you think of krakens, you’re not alone. The scientists think there might be even bigger squid out there, possibly the partner of this one at 15m long. I’m not suprised but I think they’re thinking too small - I can’t quite make myself swim off boats in deep water, as I’m convinced there are 100m squids down there in the depths.

PPS The live webcast? It’s cool, but it’s also a bit disgusting. Beware for the images will get stuck in your head. Here’s that link again in case you missed it.

As I’ve wandered around New York city lately a couple things have struck me as being relevant to the self-aware science geek. Here’s the first. More to come.

For one, I went to New York magazine‘s shopping pages to see what pretty things were for sale and where. There I came across a Design*Sponge‘s take on the purdiest things to take home. And lo and behold item number 105 out of 126 on her Shop-A-Matic list was a “Science series decanter” on sale at Clio in Soho for a whopping $334 (actually that’s for the small one. The large one is $485). Now this is great because it means that science is trendy but it’s also stupid because only a fashion slave douchebag would buy this item for a small fortune when you can get the real deal for $7.95 from Edmund Scientific’s. That one’s 1000ml so it should fit a bottle of wine just fine. But if you want an even larger one to hold your wine in a slightly prettier fashion get the 2000ml one from 4Physics.com for $18.30.

Ah New York. Anne is there right now. She’s probably eating as we speak. Maybe at our favorite dumpling house on Eldridge Street. Or at the nouveau Mac and Cheese restaurant S’Mac. Or maybe that wicked sushi restaurant our friend Katie found...or cupcakes at the Magnolia bakery (though not really as good as cracked up to be, still v. tasty)...or maybe she’s found some amazing taqueria and is downing delicious pulled pork tacos.

Can you tell I’m hungry?

Anyways. If any of those restaurants she visits are parts of national chains, she will soon (Saturday) have the opportunity to check the calorie count of all her foods conveniently in the store before ordering/purchasing. For New York, ever the health maverick - what with it’s Big City smoking ban and trans fat ban - is trying to force all restaurants with at least 15 chains nationwide to display calorie counts on menus. The restaurants aren’t liking it and there’s been some legal rigmarole over when the requirement is going into action but some stores have started doing it anyways - like Starbucks.

So yes, you can finally see exactly how many calories you save by trying the gummy low fat muffin compared to its oil-infested neighbor.

The question remains whether it will change people’s eating habits and, erm, actually combat obesity as argued by the lawyers upholding the regulation against challenges from the New York Restaurant Association.

Personally, I’d like to see this kind of calorie-labeling trend take off.......and push restaurants into offering slightly healthier options and, MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY, smaller portion sizes. Many obesity researchers and eating psychology experiments suggest that our obesity crisis is owes much gratitude to the inflation of standard meal sizes.

This is something that restaurants could easily tackle. For example, the Starbucks Oat Fudge bar (so delicious...have you had one?) weighs in at 440 calories. But half of one would suffice beautifully. I mean, I kind of feel ill eating a whole one (this does not stop me - curse of fat gene). One could offer a similar treatment to those cookies and scones and loaf slices that are approximately the size of my head.

It’s a great business model: they could offer half the amount of food, but drop the price by just 20% and display an attractively low calorie count. Nice. I think we’re on to something here.....

Are you a fan of the fig? With parma ham and camembert perhaps? Or honey and greek yoghurt? Or dried and chopped and baked in a cake? Or mushed up into a figgy pudding (which we all like). Or perhaps dried, cooked into a jam and then folded into a soft biscuit - the noble fig roll (fig newton to those of you in North America).

Well, for now you might have to lay the fig love aside, and eat apricots. Or banana chips. Or indeed chocolate chip cookies, for the fig is a limited edition fruit. Fans of the fig roll have noticed bare shelves in supermarkets across Britain and have been contacting media outlets acros the country with their concerns. Which are not groundless as it turns out. Heat and drought in Greece and Turkey last year and a recall due to an unusually high level of toxic bloom on Turkish fruit have led to a dearth of figs, and the California crop can’t keep up with demand. It’s a bit like the chaos theory with the butterfly and the storm. But with figs. And heatwaves.

(PHOTO: SPIDERS)

We’ve blogged about witty element earrings sold on Etsy and periodic table socks.

Now INN designs has introduced some Periodic Rings that up the ante. By several thousands of dollars. But what else do you expect from a solid silver, gold or platinum ring? If you’re serious about pledging your allegiance to chemistry, perhaps this is the way to do it.

They kind of resemble men’s signet rings. So I’m thinking you get three in one: a clever periodic table reference, an artistically sculpted hunk of precious metal, and something to press into hot wax to seal those scrolls you use to invite people over for some weekend wine and cheese. Oh and also: Forget the plebeian brass knuckles; these pricey suckers will definitely leave a dent in your molester’s eye socket.

VIA Notcot

So remember when everyone was all ACK! SIZE ZERO MODELS ARE DROPPING DEAD ON THE RUNWAY AND RUINING OUR GIRLS’ MINDS!!!!!!

Well the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. And it’s attempting to flatten on Ms. Chloe Marshall, a plus-size model from England, reigning Miss Surrey (a county just south of London).

Ms. Marshall is 5’10 and 176 pounds (or so the US papers say), giving her a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25.3. The “normal” range is 18 - 25. She’s not exactly obese - in fact she would have to be 210 pounds to be technically obese. Chloe is spoutin’ lots of curvy girl power and frankly, she’s pretty hot, so more power to her.

But one Ms. Monica Grenfell, a dietitian and columnist for the UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, thinks that Chloe is a v. bad role model. If you don’t care to read the whole article then I’ll give you some choice snippets:

“It would send an appalling - and very dangerous - message to other young women that it’s OK to be fat.... Chloe is a stark reminder that obesity is now virtually normal in our society - and we should all be hanging our heads in shame.....She is an ambassador not for the beautiful larger lady as she’d have us believe but a poster girl for diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, cancers and all the other devastating and potentially fatal health problems that are caused or exacerbated by obesity. “

Now I must return to the fact that Chloe ain’t obese. Whether she’ll end up obese in later life is another question (the girl is only 17), but it is certainly not a forgone conclusion. Ms. Grenfell says that Chole’s BMI is 26.03 (she obviously has slightly different information about her weight). Whatever. While BMI certainly isn’t the be all end all measure of health, at 25.3 or 26.03 it’s clear that Chloe is very slightly overweight (by 2 to 7 pounds based on a normal upper limit of 24.9).

Of course Ms. Grenfell, the DIETITIAN says that Chloe should have a BMI of 20 - or about 140 pounds. This is unabashedly wrong. I’d expect a profession to know that. Of course this is the woman who wrote “5 Days to a Flatter Stomach.” And, more recently, “Crash Diet: Lose 7 Pounds in 7 Days.”

Oh blah. Blah blah. We can’t win, can we? You’re either glorifying skinniness, or fatness AND FOR GOD’S SAKE LET’S THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN. The simple fact is that Chloe is a weeee bit overweight and many models are a weee bit underweight. When we start praising “curves” on a 250 pound 5’4” woman (BMI 42.9) or the “elegance” of some 5’11” chick who only weighs 95 pounds (BMI 13.2) then we should get worried.

So I got my genome scanned by Navigenics for a story I wrote for the LA Times. It went up yesterday. The scariest thing I found was that I carry one copy of the APOE4, the allele of the gene associated with an increased risk of late onset Alzheimer’s disease. People with one copy are 3-4 times more likely to get AD. Those with two copies are 15 times more likely to develop it - and earlier in life.

APOE - or apolipoprotein E - is a normal compound that transports cholesterol around the blood and seems also to be responsible for depositing plaques in the brains of AD patients. Fun.

My grandmother AD it, so it’s not exactly shocking that I carry the risk factor. What’s left to be determined is whether there is anything we can do about it. AD is linked to high blood pressure, cholesterol, high fat diet, diabetes, head injuries, lack of exercise, low education level and mental activity (the use it or lose it angle).

So here’s the extra funny part. I also have two copies of the “risk” allele for the fat gene FTO - discovered last April by a team of UK researchers as they were exploring massive cohorts of diabetics. FTO is widely lauded as the first widespread fat gene - all the other ones were random freaky mutation that only appeared in a couple of people.  16% of people in the research cohorts had two copies of the fat gene, weighing an average of 3 kilos more with a 67% increased risk of being obese. The effects were seen starting from just seven years old (ironically, when I started to pudge out. It’s hilarious to be able to see yourself so directly in research studies).

To sum up: I have an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (normal for women is about 17% lifetime risk - mine is 29%) and two copies of a gene that make it harder for me to avoid the AD risk factors - obesity, diabetes etc. Fun! So fun! Thanks Mom and Dad!

That’s my news. I have to go not eat now.

It’s true. For most of us coffee drinkers, the dark liquid functions as a fuel of sorts for our brains. But get this, after making brain fuel out of coffee beans, Italian researchers from La Sapienza University in Rome believe they can transform the dregs of their nation’s 70 million cups of coffee to fuel stoves and boilers. So the bean makes coffee. And the spent coffee grinds make fuel to help make MORE coffee.

Do you see the beautiful circle of caffeinated life going on here? Do you?!?