food (Page 20)

Eating certain foods together, such as chicken and broccoli or salmon and watercress, can help fight cancer. Combining foods containing the two components sulforaphane and selenium makes them 13 times more powerful than when they’re eaten alone, when it comes to fighting cancer. Sulforaphane is a plant chemical found at high concentrations in broccoli, sprouts, cabbage, watercress and arugula. Foods rich in selenium are nuts, poultry, fish, eggs, sunflower seeds and mushrooms. Selenium deficiency has been linked to many types of cancers, including prostate.

We may soon see special cancer-fighting frozen dinners in grocery stores and anti-cancer entrees in restaurants, such as chicken with sprouts, red cabbage and nuts sprinkled on top.
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Scientists now think fast food and sweets are as addictive as heroin, because they set off hormonal changes in the body which make it hard to stop eating them. According to New Scientist magazine, “New and potentially explosive findings on the biological effects of fast food suggest that eating yourself into obesity isn’t simply down to a lack of self-control.” Researchers think eating lots of foods that are high in fat and sugar causes the same changes in the brain as drug addiction.
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If there’s one thing we take for granted, it’s bananas. They’re always cheap and available on the grocery store shelves. But it turns out they may vanish in a decade if we don’t develop new blight-resistant varieties. Could we be facing the end of our yellow friend?

Today’s Cavendish banana has an ancestor called the Gros Michel that was wiped out by a soil fungus in the 1950s. Emile Frison, of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP), says it will take genetic engineering to save the current variety, because it lacks the genetic diversity needed to survive.
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Junk food makes you smarter, at least in the short term. A study by University of Florida shows that when schools offer high-calorie lunches on days when students take standardized tests, the students do better than they do when they eat healthier lunches.

The study found that when high-calorie, low-nutrition meals were given to students in schools that faced possible state sanctions for underachievment, scores increased 11% in math, 6% in English and 6% in social studies. Researchers compared the nutritional content of school lunch menus from 23 randomly selected districts in Virginia on days of state-mandated tests and compared them with non-test days during the 1999-2000 school year.
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