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Natural chemicals found in onions and garlic that may protect against cancer

Onions & Garlic

Bioflavonoids are complex compounds found in many plants, especially citrus fruit. They are closely linked to vitamin C and enhance its effects. They are often trumpeted for their antioxidant effects, and because they inhibit histamine release are thought beneficial for inflammatory or allergic conditions.

There are several hundred different kinds of bioflavonoid, many of which have been recognized for particular health benefits. The rutin in buckwheat, for instance, is thought to be good for hemorrhoids and hypertension. The anthocyanidins in berries are thought to be powerful antioxidants. One of the most interesting is quercetin, which is found predominantly in onions and garlic. Quercetin is thought to inhibit the growth of cancer cells, especially breast cancer and leukemia. It’s also thought to help in healing wounds and preventing cataracts.

SOURCE: 101 Facts You Should Know About Food, John Farndon

Why Are the Oils Liquid and the Fats Solid?

Oils and fats

Oils are liquid if they melt below ambient temperatures, and fats are solid if they do not melt at ambient temperatures.  At the usual room temperatures in the United States, lamb tallow is one of the hardest fats, butter is a soft fat, chicken fat is almost liquid, lard can be a hard fat or a soft fat depending on what kind of a diet the animals ate, palm oil is a soft fat, and olive oil is a liquid. Canola, corn, cottonseed, peanut, safflower, soybean, or sunflower oils are very liquid and they have not been partially hydrogenated. Thus the natural fats range from very hard fats to very soft fats to viscous oils to liquid oils.

Whether these food lipids are called fats or oils sometimes depends on the ambient temperature where they originate. Palm Oil and Olive Oil are fruit oils, and Coconut Oil is from a fruit, which is also a seed; they are liquids at the ambient temperature where they are produced. Palm kernel oil is a seed oil that is liquid in the tropics. Some of the oils like olive oil are very solid when they are stored in the refrigerator. Some like palm oil are separated into several semi-solid forms for use in foods. Figure 1.4 shows what these fats and oils look like at different temperatures.

Figure 1.4:Melting Characteristics of Oil

The practice of calling animal fats “saturated” is not only misleading, it is just plain wrong. For example, beef fat is 54 percent unsaturated, lard is 60 percent unsaturated, and chicken fat is about 70 percent unsaturated. This makes these animal fats “less than half” saturated. Therefore, they really should be called unsaturated fats. In fact, none of the naturally occurring fats and oils is made up of only all saturated or all unsaturated fatty acids; rather they are mixtures of different amounts of various fatty acids.

SOURCE:  Know Your Fats : The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol; Mary G. Enig, PhD

The Five Major Taste of Food

Taste of Food

The taste of a food is a combination of five major tastes—salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. It is complex and hard to describe completely. Sweet and salt tastes are detected primarily on the tip of the tongue, and so they are detected quickly, whereas bitter tastes are detected mainly by taste buds at the back of the tongue. It takes longer to perceive a bitter taste and it lingers in the mouth; thus, bitter foods are often described as having an aftertaste. Sour tastes are mainly detected by the taste buds along the side of the tongue.

Sugars, alcohols, aldehydes, and certain amino acids taste sweet to varying degrees. Acids (such as vinegar, lemon juice, and the many organic acids present in fruits) contribute the sour taste, saltiness is due to salts, including sodium chloride, and bitter tastes are due to alkaloids such as caffeine, theobromine, quinine, and other bitter compounds.

Umami is a taste that recently has been added to the other four. It is a savory taste given by ingredients such as monosodium glutamate (MSG) and other flavor enhancers. The umami taste is significant in Japanese foods and in snack foods such as taco-flavored chips.

Here is a list of a few of the many  processed foods developed in the 1920s and 1930s. You may be surprised to see  how long these familiar foods have been around.

Wonder Bread

WONDER BREAD (1921) The Taggart Baking Company of  Indianapolis, Indiana, came out with a one and a half pound loaf of white bread that contained preservatives to keep it fresh. In 1930 WONDER BREAD was sold as sliced bread (Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the first machine that sliced and wrapped bread in 1928). From this new product came the expression, “The greatest thing since sliced bread.”

Quaker Oats

QUAKER OATS (1921) The Quaker Oats Company introduced quickcooking oatmeal (cooked in five minutes instead of twenty), and it became one of the United States’ first convenience foods.

Wheaties

WHEATIES (1924) The Washburn-Crosby Company introduced thiscereal that would become known as the Breakfast of Champions.

PeterPan Peanut Butter

PETER PAN PEANUT BUTTER (1928) Swift Packing Company introduced its first hydrogenated (chemical process that makes unsaturated fat more solid), homogenized peanut butter (the homogenization process of  keeping the peanut butter from separating) invented by J. L. Rosefield in 1922. In 1932 Rosefield produced his own brand and called it SKIPPY PEANUT BUTTER.

Rice Krispies

RICE KRISPIES (1928) This cereal, one of many by the Kellogg Company, had the popular saying, “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” first appear on its box in 1932. The three happy gnomes came along in 1933 to represent the sounds of the food. In Sweden these characters say, “Piff! Paff! Puff!” and in Germany they say, “Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!”

Gerber Baby Food

GERBER BABY FOOD (1929) Daniel Gerber began selling strained baby foods in cans to  grocery stores. Some mothers resisted buying the product until salt was added to it in 1931.Babies couldn’t tell the difference, but mothers who tasted their babies’ food could.

Birds Eye Frozen Food

BIRDS EYE FROSTED FOODS (1930) General Foods introduced Birds Eye Frosted Food. They were advertised as foods fresh frozen that traveled from plant to store to rental freezer (the only freezers available before home freezers were developed). These frosted foods were developed by Clarence Birdseye (father of the frozen-food industry) when he discovered during a visit to the Arctic in 1914 that fish pulled from icy waters froze rock hard and could be kept for weeks. When they were cooked, they tasted fresh. However, the system of buying and keeping frozen foods had some drawbacks for the consumer. In the 1930s and 1940s, people had to rent a space at a frozen-food locker plant to store their frosted food. When they wanted to use frozen food, they had to drive to the locker, making the system inconvenient until home freezers arrived in the 1950s.

Fritos Corn chips

FRITOS CORN CHIPS (1932) Ice-cream salesman Elmer Doolin ate lunch in a Texas sandwich shop that was selling fried corn chips (made with Mexican corn masa). He bought the recipe, the FRITOS name, and a potato ricer for one hundred dollars from Gustave Olguin, the owner of the shop. Doolin kept expanding his territory to sell FRITOS corn chips until he eventually merged his company in 1961 with the H. W. Lay Company, and the name Frito-Lay, Inc., was created. Soon many Americans loved to  “muncha buncha Fritos.”

RITZ Crackers

RITZ CRACKERS (1933) The National Biscuit Company developed around, buttery cracker and called it Ritz because it was so rich tasting.

Kraft Mac & Cheese

KRAFT MACARONI & CHEESE DINNER (1937) Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner was introduced by National  Dairy Products and consisted  of grated American cheese and Tenderoni Macaroni in a box. It was advertised on the Kraft Music Hall radio show as “a meal for four in nine  minutes for an everyday price of nineteen cents.”

SPAM classic

SPAM & COMPANY (1937) This spiced ham product, introduced by the  George A. Hormel Company, would become the world’s largest-selling canned meat by 1942 when the United States entered World War II. Millions of cans of this fatty ground pork shoulder mixed with salt, ham,  sugar, and sodium nitrite were shipped overseas to feed the Allied troops.

Toll Chocochips

NESTLÉ CORPORATION’S CHOCOLATE MORSELS (1939) Nestlé developed chocolate morsels (chocolate chips) to go in Toll House cookies. In 1930 Ruth Wakefield invented the actual recipe for chocolate chip cookies in her Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. It happened by accident when Wakefield was making cookies for her customers, and she realized that she was out of baker’s chocolate. In a panic, she chopped up a semisweet chocolate bar and dumped the pieces into the cookie dough. After baking the cookies, she was surprised to see that the chocolate didn’t melt into the dough as she had expected, and the United States’ favorite cookie, the chocolate chip, was born. In 1939 she signed a contract with Nestlé to let them use her Toll House recipe on the back of their morsel packages.