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.....

So I have recently become addicted to Top Chef. So much so that I acquired the entire season 3 on Friday and proceeded to watch the entire thing in a disgusting fit of TV gorging all weekend long. I am vile. (Season 4 is playing right now...it’s not too late to get hooked. Go...go now).

It’s kind of like Project Runway for chefs - each episode they have to do two very difficult cooking challenges - limited time, budget, weird ingredients etc - and have them judged by some of the best chefs in the world. One of the challenges in Season 3 was to take classic American food, including as meatloaf, chicken a la king, cabbage rolls, lasagna, mac and cheese, tuna casserole, frank and beans, and make them LOWER CHOLESTEROL. Not lower fat or saturated fat or calories, but lower CHOLESTEROL.

This irketh me. Mostly because it’s wrongity wrong wrong. Let me explain.

For years and years doctors had noted that people with high total cholesterol had more heart attacks. This lead to the logical conclusion that by EATING less DIETARY cholesterol one could drop your BLOOD cholesterol. Remember when everything said “cholesterol free” and our dads were told to stay WELL clear of high cholesterol foods such as eggs?

Well it turns out that was all kind of wrong. Because EATING cholesterol seems to have little impact on the ratio of good:bad cholesterol (high density lipoprotein: low density lipoprotein), which is actually a much stronger indicator of heart disease risk than total cholesterol. Indeed, many nutrition scientists argue that it is eating the trans and saturated fats (not cholesterol) that bumps up blood cholesterol and skews the ratio to the bad. Check out the summary of the situation at this 2000 paper published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.

Did I mention that was a 2000 paper...eight years ago? This is not new science and frankly I was kind of appalled that the Top Chef dudes haven’t figured that out. I realize their job is NOT to make healthy food, but fuck-off tasty food, but come on. The balance of evidence today is pointing to the fact that a diet high in artificial fats, saturated fats and traditional vegetable oils (canola and corn) and low in olive oil, fish (the omega-3 etc) is really driving heart disease risk. And SOMEBODY on the production team should have figured this out.

I probably wouldn’t have been so cheesed had not the judges singled out one dude for using lobster in his dish. Per 100 gram serving, lobster has 90 calories and 0.9 grams of total fat total...but it has 95 mg of cholesterol (about half an egg’s worth). For comparison, 100 grams of skinless, boneless chicken breast has 110 calories and 1.24 grams of fat....but just 58 mg of cholesterol. We’re theoretically supposed to limit consumption to 300 mg per day.

So by the CHOLESTEROL method, lobster is a sin indeed. But if - as science can now tell us - that EATING cholesterol in food, doesn’t functionally RAISE cholesterol in the blood, then I say the lobster is actually the healthier food. Fewer calories, saturated fat and more uber-health omega-3s (yes, yes there is the PRICE problem, but that’s another blog post, isn’t it?)

The public has surely been jerked around by the evolving science of dietary fats: what’s good, what’s bad and how much should we eat of ‘em. Helping people to understand these changes is IMPERATIVE. A show like Top Chef - with it’s superstars (Oh Padma the beautiful) and high entertainment value - is a prime opportunity to teach these very facts. I am INCREDIBLY disappointed that they just added to the confusion.

But I still love the show. That Padma, I tell you.

(PHOTO: SOPHIE)
For the past week I’ve been sitting mostly in one spot, drinking shiteloads of lemon honey goodness, blowing my nose, and pondering my snotty state. That’s mostly because my sinuses exploded into runny gunkyness right underneath my face , which made it hard to think about anything else.

Frankly, snot has been on my mind in that cloying way that makes me suspect it might literally be spreading through my brain.

So now that I’m coming out of the cold (I’ve moved into the dry cough to the wet cough to the annoying-everybody-in-the-office cough) I’ve become slightly philosophical about my snotty state. What happened??

Well according to the CDC when your nose and sinus get infected with germs your nose makes clear mucus in an attempt (feeble in my case) to wash away said germs. This mucus is clear. After a couple days (this would have landed me on precious Good Friday - the first long weekend of the Canadian year) your body’s immune cells fight back. Apparently this battle changes the mucus to a white or yellow color - I have no idea why. This is what the CDC writes next: “As the bacteria that live in the nose grow back, they may also be found in the mucus, which changes the mucus to a greenish color.” Which begs the question, if they’re normal happy nose bacteria then why isn’t my snot always green. Say what?

So lucky for me Dr. Rod Moser has the answer in this post from WebMD: “After sitting in a congested nasal passage all night, mucous becomes stagnant....just like a green pond.” Eeenteresting, if not absolutely foul to think about. But Dr. Moser does go on to drill home the message that green snot ‘snot bad news. And just because it’s green doesn’t mean you need to bully your Doctor into prescribing you or your child antibiotics.

Still, where does the color green come from? Well. It comes from the color wheel. A New Scientist article explains that two of the common types of human nasal bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas pyocyanea take on a a golden yellow and blue hue respectively. Mix them together and let them fester in a congested nasal passage and what do you get? Grotty green snot.  It’s practically art. And if that isn’t a truly enlightened view of your head cold, well I’ll just go jump in a lake. 

Giving babies probiotic bacteria - harmless bacteria normally found in our bodies, notably our digestive systems - has long been theorized to be a method of preventing allergies. From a theoretical standpoint, It certainly makes sense. According to the hygiene hypothesis, we develop allergies in part because our immune systems are under-challenged by a “too clean” environment, devoid of our natural microbes and parasites. Without the proper stimulation, it goes a bit haywire and starts attack all sorts of otherwise benign molecules, such as peanut proteins or egg whites. So if you feed babies lots of probiotic-rich foods, cultured milks and yogurt, they should have plenty of bacteria, the immune system should keep healthily occupied.

A multitude of clinical trials have tested probiotics for both the prevention and treatment of allergies. This review from January 2008 from The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found that, yes, probiotics do indeed help prevent allergies, but not actually treat them. Fair enough.

It’s possible that breastfed babies get more probiotics from their mother’s milk, which might explain why breastfed babies are less likely to develop allergies. Another theory on the breast-allergy relationship is that eating food proteins (peanut, pollen, egg, dairy) via breast milk (ie mother eats it and it is transmitted to baby through breast milk) might actually help the baby become tolerant as opposed to allergic to the protein (Here is a neat little study from Nature Medicine on mice that showed just that).

Of course the studies here can be a bit conflicting. The most recent suggest that breastfeeding for 4 to 6 months decreases risk of allergies and asthma, but continuing after that seems to increase risk. Weirdly.

Now another prong to the “Breast Is Best” movement is emerging: the added probiotics from breastfeeding might help babies regulate their weights. A follow up of 49 babies from a large Finnish study that was originally testing the probiotics-allergy connection has revealed that those who had higher levels of Bifidobacteria (good and found in many yogurts) and lower levels of Staphylococcus aureus (bad) were less likely to be overweight at 7 years old. Which kind of fits with the observation that allergies and obesity are linked...any may even provide the mechanism that everyone is searching for…

Now you might get all fusty and dig up this paper, which found little connection between childhood obesity and adult obesity (only significantly predicted adult fatness after age 13..), but all told, the story that is emerging on the potential importance of healthy gut bacteria, even from a very early age, is enough to make you wanna feed your child with and then bathe them in raw milk (errr, sort of).

(THIS IS ME AND BOAZY, THE KING OF KATS, SNOOZING AT MY COUSIN’S IN NYC A COUPLE YEARS AGO)
So recently I’ve started dividing my friends into nappers and non nappers. I find that the non nappers are quite unsympathetic to the nappers and write them off as lay abouts. But! Wait!! They serve a function. Other than snoozing through the doldrums of the day. They work to solidify long term memory. How cool is that??

This is very welcome news because lately I’ve taken to cat napping one of our office cats and taking a cat nap with her on the love seat in the conference room. Her purring is better than a low rpm car engine at sending me to dreamland. And, now that the researchers from University of Haifa’s Center for Brain and Behavior Research in Israel mention it, it really might quicken the “storage of long-term memory.” Mind you, in their experiments they found this was only true of 90 minute naps. And well, I rarely conk out for that long. But maybe I should. For the betterment of the speed at which I consolidate my long-term memory.

Yeah, that’s totally what I’m going to start calling it. Practice it with me fellow nappers: “Pshaw. I’m not NAPPING! Jeee-ez. I’m consolidating my long term memory. Like, duh!”

Thank god for the research of “Professor Popsicle” the University of Manitoba thermophysiologist Gordon Giesbrecht. Bless his soul the man did all these live simulations to determine what the best way of surviving a sinking car is. All in all he used up 80 vehicles in his experiments.

Now you may think this is an obscure skill set that you will probably never cash in on - sure we’ve seen the scene countless times in movies but that’s hollywood right? Eat your words (or thoughts): seven to 10 per cent of all drownings in Canada happen in vehicles. Scary much?

So. Here’s what you do. Remove your seatbelt. Free your children. Roll down the window (never fear: electric window will still work underwater). Escape.

Don’t open the door. It will be difficult to do and will only succeed in sinking your car in about 10 seconds as opposed to the sixty it would take left to its own devices. And don’t get your cell phone out to call for help.

Now if you often drive around winter roads or lakes it might be worth your while to spring for a “centre punch” tool, Giesbrecht recommends. The tool has a point on it that will break glass with minimal force as well as a small blade for cutting a stuck seatbelt. 

The other day I was watching some TV with my mother when an advertisement for probiotic yogurt popped up. The ad was suggesting that this particular yogurt’s combo of probiotic bacteria would boost immune system function and help digestion and blah blah goodness. So mom asks what probiotics were, exactly, and if they are any different than the bog standard bacteria used to culture milk into yogurt. It’s good question.

The most common probiotics - which generally refers to microbes that promote health in some way or another - are species from the Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium genera. Both of them can turn sugars in to lactic acid (ie ferment) and thereby make yogurt.

Which leaves us with two questions. 1) Do probiotics promote health? 2) Are the pricey probiotic-labeled yogurts better than your average tub?

1) Yes! Happy bacteria do seem to promote good health. The list of purported benefits is long indeed, but among the best proven is bowel problems… Take this 2005 study on preventing antibiotic-associated diarrhea in babies using two strains of bacteria often used in yogurt production: Bifidobacterium lactis and Streptococcus thermophilus.

There are a whack of other claims, but the science is still in its infancy, really. Here’s a sampling: Probiotics have show some effectiveness in combating stomach ulcers (likely by out competing off the bad H. pylori bacteria). Probiotics might help prevent allergies in kids...but a recent review from the Cochrane Database (who do very good, standardized and objective analyses) found little hard evidence of their powers.

2) For this, the answer is even more murky...for the people marketing the extra healthy yogurts would have you believe. that their special blend or unique species is the key to eternal life. While it’s true that clinical trials testing the effects of specific bacteria can only then be applied that same bacteria in the same dose, I don’t buy that their particular brand of oh-so-special bacteria is oh-so-special. The major mode of action of all these probiotics is out-competing bad bacteria, so if a species survives past the stomach and into the gut, it can probably do that. Maybe there’s some extra peppy bacteria, but I remain underwhelmed.

Let’s take my favorite brand of yogurt, Astro, as an example. Astro makes lots of different yogurts including their BioBest probiotic yogurt, BioBest Vitalite probiotic yogurt (special for digestion with prebiotics..the food that probiotics like to eat) and their normal stuff.

In the BioBest Vitalite we have “active bacterial cultures” comprising Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium lactis and Lactobacillus casei.
In the BioBest we have “active bacterial cultures” comprising Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacillus bifidus (old name of Bifidobacterium bifidum)
In the regular stuff we have “active bacterial cultures”.

So what’s in the normal stuff? How much of the good stuff is in the probiotic-labeled stuff? My guess is that the regular stuff has the first two cultures - Streptococcus and L. bulgaricus - as they are very common yogurt bacterias. Researchers studying their survival in the human gut previously found conflicting results, but recent reports suggest that yes! they can live in the gut and yes! that makes them probiotics! Probably.

And while companies probably have lots of data saying that their blend can do this that or the other thing, until I see some controlled clinical trials showing that special health bacteria is better than the ho-hum brand of yogurt that I love (Astro Strawberries and Cream, no slimy fruit chunks and only 1% fat), I ain’t wasting my money on a marketing ploy.

Well according to Cliff Arnall, a psychologist from Cardiff University in Wales, that would make sense since according to his calculations, January 21st is the saddest day of 2008.

According to the shallow news reports that covered his discovery his equation goes like this:

His formula reads [W+(D-d)]xTQ MxNA, in which W is the weather, D is debt (minus the amount of money to be paid on your next pay day); T is time since Christmas; Q is the failed attempt to quit a bad habit; M is general motivational levels, and NA is the need to take action and have something to look forward to.

As a ying to January 21st’s yang, Arnall has also come up with some basic maths to calculate the happiest day of the year. Here’s that equation:

The formula, O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He, calculates the variables of being outdoors and outdoor activity (O), nature (N), social interaction (S), childhood summers and positive memories (Cpm), temperature (T) and holidays and anticipating time off (He)

Which works out to Friday June 20th. Of course you could argue that this is all kablooey what with sketchy variables like “childhood summers and positive memoreis” and “general motivational levels.” I mean, really? REALLY??? Back in high school my friends and I would dorkily graph the attractiveness of men along various variables and how kickass the year was going against time. Now I see we should have submitted our sketches to the local science fair in expectation of making the news.

(PHOTO: LANCE PALMER)

It’s a universal truth, like gravity. Make a ground beef patty. Cook it. And it shrinks. No matter how you swing it, what you peel off the grill will be smaller than what you slapped on it.

Turns out this very trait can be used to tell whether a burger is sufficiently cooked or not - something the fast food industry has problems with every so often (see “Beef with Burger” subhead on this list of ”The 10 Most Nauseating Stories About Bad Fast Food Meals” on CourtTv.com). The industry standard for sussing out whether all the E. Coli in your beef is fried is to temperature probe it. But this gets gross pretty fast. Imagine: probe an undone burger and then reprobe a done one and you’ve just managed to transfer a batch of germs from one to the other. Ew.

So instead, New Jersey teens Naomi Collip, Caroline Lang, and Rebecca Ehrhardt came up with the “burger cam,” which placed first at their regional Siemen’s science fair and fourth at the national one. The camera is perched above the cooking area and measures burger shrinkage, an indicator of burger done-ness and E. coli deadness.

Simply put: “We found in testing that shrinkage occurs with burger temperature so when a burger is shrunk to a certain area, it has cooked safely,” 15-year-old Rebecca Ehrhardt told abc news.

What an impressive trio. You go girls. You take universal laws of nature such as burger shrinkage and apply them to save lives. 

When I was little, my mother hardly ever bought us sugar cereals. Sure we used to get them on camping trips - sometimes - because of those handy little mini value packs, but if I ever really wanted a hit I had to swindle a bowl of Count Chocula or Trix from my friends.

Now as you all know, I get the Canadian Food Inspection Agency email alerts for undeclared allergies, toxins etc found in Canadian food. Anyways. Today there was an alert about a happy sugar cereal: Kellogg’s Holiday Froot Loops (why the bad spelling of fruit? why? does bad spelling just appeal more to children?).

It seems that our poor Kellogg’s has accidentally added some milk proteins to the cereal and omitted including this fact in their ingredient list. Which is somewhat ironic (and I admit made me laugh) because I’d say about 99% of people eating Froot Loops will add milk to their cereal anyways.

Now I realize, as an allergy sufferer myself, that this really isn’t a laughing matter. People could get very sick, even go into anaphylactic shock from eating a tainted Loop. But for me at least, it would be sort of like getting an alert that read: WARNING. UNDECLARED ALMONDS HAZELNUTS AND WALNUTS IN SKIPPY PEANUT BUTTER. Funny for me (as I am allergic to all of them), but it would send my brother (who is not allergic to peanuts, but allergic to the other tree nuts) to the hospital within minutes (not least because he eats peanut butter by the jar full).

So, er, what’s the moral of the story? Sign up for the CFIA Hazard Alerts or FDA notifications or whatever your country has to offer. Guaranteed to be life-saving or purely entertaining! Straight to your inbox!