Tag: science

I know I personally kept saying “I don’t wanna” throughout my master’s degree.

Some doctors and registered dietitians say they are increasingly seeing people whose desire to eat pure or “clean” food—from raw vegans to those who cut out multiple major food sources such as gluten, dairy and sugar—becomes an all-consuming obsession and leads to ill health. In extreme cases, people will end up becoming malnourished.

Some experts refer to the condition as orthorexia nervosa, a little-researched disorder that doesn’t have an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, considered the bible of psychiatric illnesses. Often, individuals with orthorexia will exhibit symptoms of recognized conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or end up losing unhealthy amounts of weight, similar to someone with anorexia.

“There are people who become malnourished, not because they’re restricting how much they eat, it’s what they’re choosing to eat,” said Thomas Dunn, a psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colo., and a co-author of the article. “It’s not that they’re doing it to get thin, they’re doing it to get healthy. It’s just sort of a mind-set where it gets taken to an extreme like what we see with other kinds of mental illness,” Dr. Dunn said.

Among the proposed criteria: an obsession with the quality and composition of meals to the extent that people may spend excessive amounts of time, say three or more hours a day, reading about and preparing specific types of food; and having feelings of guilt after eating unhealthy food. The preoccupation with such eating would have to either lead to nutritional imbalances or interfere with daily functional living to be considered orthorexia.

Some Diets That Might Leave Out Nutrients

DAIRY-FREE: Pro: Some people feel better when avoiding dairy even if aren’t truly allergic. Challenge: Make sure to get calcium, phosphorus and potassium from other foods.

RAW VEGAN: Pro: Plant-based diets are nutritious and are associated with lower rates of obesity and chronic disease. Challenge: Some vitamins, especially B12, are mostly in animal products. Cooking can make some nutrients more bio available.

JUICING DIETS, CLEANSES: Pro: If used short term to kick start eating more fruits and vegetables, this diet can be acceptable. Challenge: Juices aren’t nutritionally complete. And cleansing is a misnomer as your body is ‘cleansed’ by the kidneys, digestive tract and lungs.

GLUTEN-FREE: Pro: Gluten is a must avoid for people with an allergy. Those who are sensitive may find they feel much better. Challenge: A complete diet can be achieved with energy- and nutrient-rich foods such as non-wheat grains.

Sometimes other illnesses can lead to orthorexia. David Rakel, director of integrative medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, estimated that 10% to 15% of the patients who come in with food allergies and related problems develop an unhealthy fear of particular foods.

Nutritional therapy often involves elimination diets—stopping to eat certain foods to check if they are contributing to an inflammatory condition, Dr. Rakel said. Under the program, the foods are later gradually reintroduced, but some people continue to avoid them. “People are getting so strict with their health choices that they’re not getting the nutrients that they need,” he said.

“Someone on paper may be perfectly healthy and their blood work is great and their weight is fine but their behavior has become obsessive with food,” said Marjorie Nolan Cohn, a New York City-based dietitian and national spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a professional organization. A red flag is when someone’s eating habits are making them avoid social engagements, Ms. Cohn said. “They may not be able to go out to a restaurant with their friends because they don’t know what’s in the food or it’s not cooked in a certain way or what if it’s not organic olive oil?” she said.

The National Institutes of Health said it has uncovered a nearly century-old container of ricin and a handful of other forgotten samples of dangerous pathogens as it combs its laboratories for improperly stored hazardous materials. The agency began an intensive investigation of all its facilities after a scientist in July found vials of smallpox dating from the 1950s, along with other contagious viruses and bacteria that had been stored and forgotten in one lab on the NIH’s campus.

Friday, the NIH said in different facilities, it found small amounts of five improperly stored “select agents,” pathogens that must be registered and kept only in certain highly regulated laboratories. All were found in sealed and intact containers, with no evidence that they posed a safety risk to anyone in the labs or surrounding areas, the agency said in a memo to employees. All have been destroyed.

They included a bottle of ricin, a highly poisonous toxin, found in a box with microbes dating from 1914 and thought to be 85 to 100 years old, the memo said. The bottle was labeled as originally containing 5 grams, although NIH doesn’t know how much was left. Also discovered were samples listing pathogens that cause botulism, plague, tularemia and a rare tropical infection called melioidosis. These samples were in different labs, mostly in historical collections that scientists once routinely kept in the backs of freezers or on dusty shelves but that today require special handling.

Beer and whiskey lovers, raise a glass to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which has just taken in 20,000 new crop varieties—including 575 types of barley. The seeds, sourced from more than a hundred countries, arrived this week to coincide with the vault’s sixth birthday.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seedbank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) from the North Pole.

The seedbank is 120 metres inside a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen Island, and employs robust security systems. Seeds are packaged in special four-ply packets and heat sealed to exclude moisture. Spitsbergen was considered ideal because it lacked tectonic activity and had permafrost, which aids preservation. Its being 130 metres above sea level will keep the site dry even if the ice caps melt. Locally mined coal provides power for refrigeration units that further cool the seeds to the internationally recommended standard of −18 °C. If the equipment fails, at least several weeks will elapse before the facility rises to the surrounding sandstone bedrock’s temperature of −3 °C. It’s also located in a politically stable and remote part of the world, which means that there are fewer hazards posed by messy humanity. And under international treaty, military activity is forbidden there.

As a “safety deposit box” to protect the diversity of the world’s food genes, the advanced facility houses 820,619 crop varieties. The goal of the vault is to safely preserve as many different varieties of crop species as possible before they disappear during large-scale regional or global crises. It will be also be frequently accessed when other genebanks lose samples due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts, and natural disasters. These events occur with some regularity. War and civil strife have have a history of destroying some genebanks. Some 1,400 “crop diversity collections” exist globally, many in politically unstable or environmentally threatened nations.

As we’ve come to rely on just a handful of the highest yielding varieties of fruits, vegetables, and grains, thousands of other varieties are disappearing at an alarming rate. Given an uncertain future, with climate change and diseases that could wipe out a variety overnight, scientists say it’s important to keep as many different crop varieties as we can.

A feasibility study prior to construction determined that the vault could, for hundreds of years, preserve most major food crops’ seeds. Some, including those of important grains, could survive far longer—possibly thousands of years.

Here are a few highlights of the recent acquisition.

In the first ever seed deposit from Japan, the Barley Germplasm Center, located at Okayama University, sent in 575 types of barley, with plans to send another 5,000 in the future. Barley experts in the country became concerned about the stability of their gene banks following the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

That’s because the grain is a staple of traditional Japanese cuisine. Barley is fermented to make beer, forms the base of miso soup, is roasted to make a cold tea called mugicha, and is distilled to make a Scotch-like whiskey. In 2010, Japanese brewer Sapporo made a limited-edition “space beer” with barley grown from seeds that spent five months in Russia’s Zvezda Service Module on the International Space Station.

Several of the nearly 200 species of wild potato growing from Patagonia all the way north to Colorado could go extinct by 2050 thanks to loss of habitat and climate change. That possibility has spurred the International Potato Center to action. The center shipped 195 samples of wild potato and 61 of wild sweet potato to Svalbard, in part to protect the species and to experiment with creating more nutritious, disease-resistant types of domestic potatoes.

Other “crown jewels of agriculture” are also new to the vault: The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center mailed in 1,946 types of maize and 5,964 samples of wheat. Svalbard’s collection contains wheat seeds from individual villages throughout the world, which have baked their own unique breads through the centuries.

Brazilians eat black beans with almost every meal, and they’re an important ingredient in feijoada, a bean-and-pork stew that’s largely considered the South American country’s national dish. To protect these bean varieties for the future, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation sent 514 samples to Svalbard.