What’s the Difference Between Table Salt and Sea Salt?

SEA SALT AND OTHER:
specialty salts (like Himalayan salt) are being touted as healthier than good old table salt. Many food companies have started adding sea salt in lieu of table salt, and many folks have switched over to using sea salt for everyday use. However, the switch from table salt does come with consequences – namely, iodine deficiency, which has started to reemerge in the United States. Here's a look at the differences between the salts, and how you can make the best decision for you

Iodized Table Salt:
Iodine is an essential mineral that must be obtained through food, but not a lot of foods outside of sea vegetables (like nori, wakame and kombu kelp) and saltwater fish contain it. Dairy products also contain iodine, partly due to the iodine feed supplements, which can vary. You can also find the mineral in produce, though the amounts vary depending on the iodine content of the soil, fertilizer use and irrigation practices.
When the body lacks iodine, the thyroid does not produce enough hormones to help it grow and develop. Iodine deficiency can also result in a goiter, or enlarged thyroid gland. During pregnancy and early infancy, iodine deficiency can cause irreversible effects. So, in the 1920s, when iodine deficiencies were rampant in the U.S., many food manufacturers in the U.S. began iodizing table salt. As a result, about 90 percent of homes in this country use iodized salt.


Recent data, however, indicate that more Americans have low iodine levels. A 2015 commentary published in the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists discusses the 50 percent decrease in iodine since the 1970s and the reemergence of mild iodine deficiency. The same 2015 issue of AACE published clinical case reports about four New Jersey women who were diagnosed with goiter that was likely related to iodine deficiency.

According to the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americas, almost all Americans consume too much salt. So why is there an increase in iodine deficiency in the U.S.? There are several reasons. First, the fortification of iodine in salt is voluntary. As such, manufacturers of most sea salt, kosher salt and other types of salt do not iodize their products. In addition, salt consumption from the shaker has declined and much of the salt consumed is from commercially processed foods, which almost always contain non-iodized salt. Further, cow's milk consumption has been declining. Although the general health message is to decrease salt consumption, the type of salt is not specified. In order to prevent iodine deficiency, using iodized salt is a must.
Here's how much iodine you should get each day:
• Children 1 to 8 years old: 90 micrograms
• Children 9 to 13 years old: 120 micrograms
• Children 14 years old and older: 150 micrograms
• Pregnant and lactating women: 220 micrograms and 290 micrograms, respectively
Consuming a half-teaspoon of iodized salt provides 150 milligrams and can meet the needs of the general population. As such, iodized salt should be the primary salt used in your kitchen, in moderation.

This option includes any salt that's been harvested from the sea, as opposed to the earth. Various regions have different harvesting methods, but making sea salt generally entails the evaporation of seawater. The different methods result in variations in mineral content, color, flavor and texture. Most sea salts have large irregular shaped crystals, tend to be more expensive and are used as finishing salts. Sea salt is commonly thought of as a healthier alternative to common table salt; however, the sodium content is comparable. One advantage of sea salt is that you can use less because it takes up more volume (teaspoon for teaspoon). If you're a sea salt lover, look for brands with iodine like Morton and Hain.

Kosher salt:
This type of salt has also gained popularity because of its coarse flake-like crystals that have a subtle flavor, are easy to pinch and quickly dissolve. Kosher salt is derived from either the sea or the earth. Similar to table salt, it is made of sodium chloride, but usually without any additives. It's versatile in the kitchen and is perfect for cooking, brining, topping popcorn and rimming margarita glasses. Kosher salt is not usually iodized.

Himalayan pink salt:
This pretty option is a coarse sea salt mined in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is found in various shades of pink due to its iron, calcium, potassium and magnesium content. Typically it is not iodized.



By Toby Amidor

A Tarantula Burger.........Would you Try?

A burger restaurant in Durham, North Carolina, is offering a peculiar addition to its selection of toppings this month — alongside the usual array of cheeses, vegetables, sauces and other condiments, one special burger is presented topped by a tarantula.

The Tarantula Burger, prepared and served exclusively at Bull City Burger and Brewery during April, features a beef burger from local, pasture-raised cows, spicy chili sauce, gruyere cheese, and an oven-roasted tarantula (it is not specified whether the spider was pasture-raised), according to a description on the restaurant's website.

To participate in the so-called "2018 Tarantula Challenge," curious diners can sign up at Bull City Burger for a raffle ticket, which puts them in the running to win the signature sandwich. One winner is drawn daily and their ticket number is shared on social media; they then have 48 hours to contact the restaurant and schedule a time to devour their tarantula-topped prize. [Rattlesnake Sliders & Goat Penis: Photos of Exotic Food]

The Tarantula Challenge is part of the restaurant's annual "Exotic Meat Month" celebration; taking place every April, it offers customers a chance "to experience tastes that other cultures enjoy every day," according to the Bull City Burger website. All month, customers can sample options that may include wild boar, alligator, caribou or ostrich, to name just a few.

For example, on April 9, the restaurant served up a piping hot camel burger, garnished with queso fresco and citrus cactus salad, while python curry was the daily special on April 10, and a rabbit meatball sub debuted on April 13. The Exotic Meat Month menu even offers a dessert option — homemade ice-cream studded with chocolate-covered insects.

But while most of Bull City Burger's special menu items are available to all restaurant-goers — on a first-come, first-served basis — the Tarantula Burger is only awarded to lucky lottery winners.

And what, you may wonder, does tarantula taste like?

"People say it tastes most like crab, or other shellfish, sometimes with a bit of a metallic-y taste," restaurant representatives wrote in a tweet. However, they hinted that there were subtle differences in the tastes delivered by the arachnid's different body parts, adding that ultimately, the only way to really know is to bite the bullet — or in this case, the spider — and "try it for yourself!" they wrote.

Served with "Dirty Fries," the Tarantula Burger costs $30, according to the restaurant's website. The Tarantula Challenge Raffle will continue through the end of April, as long as there are participants willing to sign up for a chance to win the leggy burger — or until supplies run out, restaurant officials announced on Twitter.

Cooking is Very Important Belive It or Not!

Evidence suggests that developing cooking and food preparation skills is important for health and nutrition, yet the practice of home cooking is declining and now rarely taught in school. A new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that developing cooking skills as a young adult may have long-term benefits for health and nutrition.

"The impact of developing cooking skills early in life may not be apparent until later in adulthood when individuals have more opportunity and responsibility for meal preparation," said lead author Jennifer Utter, PhD, MPH, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. "The strength of this study is the large, population-based sample size followed over a period of 10 years to explore the impact of perceived cooking skills on later nutritional well-being."

Data were collected as part of the Project Eating and Activity in Teens and Young Adults longitudinal study conducted in Minneapolis-Saint Paul area schools. Participants reported on adequacy of cooking skills in 2002-2003 when they were 18 to 23 years old. Data was then collected in 2015-2016 on nutrition-related outcomes when participants were 30 to 35 years old. Questions assessed the perceived adequacy of cooking skills, how often they prepared a meal that included vegetables, how often they ate meals as a family, and how often they ate at a fast food restaurant.

Most participants perceived their cooking skills to be adequate at age 18 -- 23, with approximately one quarter of adults reporting their cooking skills to be very adequate. There were no differences in perceived cooking skills by sex, race or ethnicity, educational attainment, or age. Perceived adequacy of cooking skills predicted multiple indicators of nutrition outcomes later in adulthood including greater odds of preparing a meal with vegetables most days and less frequent consumption of fast food. If those who perceived their cooking skills as adequate had families, they ate more frequent family meals, less frequent fast food meals, and had fewer barriers to food preparation.

"Opportunities to develop cooking skills by adolescents may result in long-term benefits for nutritional well-being," said Dr. Utter. "Families, health and nutrition professionals, educators, community agencies, and funders can continue to invest in home economics and cooking education knowing that the benefits may not be fully realized until young adults develop more autonomy and live independently."

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Materials provided by Elsevier. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Parenting and personality work together to affect baby's weight gain

Offering a snack may be a sure way to soothe a fussy child, but researchers say making it a habit can result in unnecessary weight gain in babies with certain temperaments.

The researchers studied the babies' temperament and how their mothers soothed them when the babies were six months old. When the researchers followed up a year later, they found that the more the mothers used food to soothe, the more weight certain babies gained.

 

The effect was only seen in babies with surgent temperament -- characterized by being more outgoing, active and drawn to new things and people.

Cynthia Stifter, professor of human development and psychology, Penn State, said the results suggest that when parents give surgent babies food when they're not hungry -- when they're trying to calm them, for example -- those babies may be more likely to later eat for pleasure, rather than just when they're hungry.

 

"Surgent children tend to have greater reward sensitivity than other kids -- and thus greater sensitivity in the dopamine area of the brain," Stifter said. "So if food, which is highly rewarding, lights up that area quickly and intensely, they may make a stronger connection between food and feeling good, causing them to seek out food more often in the future."

Previous research has linked surgent temperament with greater weight gain and higher body mass index, but few studies have examined how a baby's temperament affects how parents feed their children. Stifter said the results are an example of how a baby's temperament can influence how his or her parents choose to parent.

"When babies respond to things in a certain way, parents pick up on that," Stifter said. "So in many ways, the baby's behavior is influencing the parents' behavior. If a parent wants to stop their child from crying, and they know that food will do that, they may use that strategy, particularly if other methods are not working."

The researchers asked 160 mothers to keep a three-day diary about how often their babies cried and what they did to calm them when the babies were six months old. The babies' temperament were also evaluated by both the parents and the researchers, who noted traits related to anger, fear, sadness, activity levels, smiling and laughing, and how the child reacted to new things and people, among others.

 

The researchers followed up a year later, when the children were 18 months old, to measure how much weight the babies gained in the previous year. They found that the more parents used food to soothe their babies when they weren't hungry, the more weight those babies gained, but only if those infants were also observed as having a surgent temperament.

The effect wasn't seen in non-surgent babies whose parents used food to soothe or in surgent babies whose parents did not use food to soothe.

Stifter said that parents may be tempted to use food to calm a crying baby because it's effective. But she added that using food as a reward can ultimately lead to overeating, especially in surgent children, and be a risk for developing obesity later on.

"Surgent kids tend to get bored easily because they're always looking for something new to capture their attention," Stifter said. "So if they're bored, and this connection has been set up in their brain between food and feeling good, they may turn to food, not out of hunger but because they're looking for something to do."

Stifter said that while there's no guarantee that these kids will turn out to be obese, other research has shown that quick, rapid weight gain puts them at risk. She said the study's results -- recently published in the International Journal of Obesity -- could be used to design new ways to educate parents about feeding their babies.

"I'd like to see parent education programs have a temperament component, to teach parents more about what their child's temperament means for them," Stifter said. "I'd also like to see these programs teach parents about hunger cues so they know when their babies are hungry, so as to avoid using food to soothe their babies when they are not hungry."

Story Source: Materials provided by Penn State. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Food waste: The biggest loss could be what you choose to put in your mouth

About a third of the food produced for human consumption is estimated to be lost or wasted globally. But the biggest waste, which is not included in this estimate, may be through dietary choices that result in the squandering of environmental resources. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), USA, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science and their colleagues have now found a novel way to define and quantify this second type of wastage. The scientists have called it "opportunity food loss," a term inspired by the "opportunity cost" concept in economics, which refers to the cost of choosing a particular alternative over better options.

 

Opportunity food loss stems from using agricultural land to produce animal-based food instead of nutritionally comparable plant-based alternatives. The researchers report that in the United States alone, avoiding opportunity food loss -- that is, replacing all animal-based items with edible crops for human consumption -- would add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, or more than the total US population, with the same land resources. "Our analysis has shown that favoring a plant-based diet can potentially yield more food than eliminating all the conventionally defined causes of food loss," says lead author Dr. Alon Shepon, who worked in the lab of Prof. Ron Milo in the Plant and Environmental Sciences Department. The Weizmann researchers collaborated with Prof. Gidon Eshel of Bard College and Dr. Elad Noor of ETZ Zürich.

The scientists compared the resources needed to produce five major categories of animal-based food -- beef, pork, dairy, poultry and eggs -- with the resources required to grow edible crops of similar nutritional value in terms of protein, calorie and micronutrients. They found that plant-based replacements could produce two- to 20-fold more protein per acre.

 

The most dramatic results were obtained for beef. The researchers compared it with a mix of crops -- soya, potatoes, cane sugar, peanuts and garlic -- that deliver a similar nutritional profile when taken together in the right proportions. The land area that could produce 100 grams of protein from these crops would yield only 4 grams of edible protein from beef. In other words, using agricultural land for producing beef instead of replacement crops results in an opportunity food loss of 96 grams -- that is, a loss of 96% -- per unit of land. This means that the potential gain from diverting agricultural land from beef to plant-based foods for human consumption would be enormous.

 

The estimated losses from failing to replace other animal-based foods with nutritionally similar crops were also huge: 90% for pork, 75% for dairy, 50% for poultry and 40% for eggs -- higher than all conventional food losses combined. "Opportunity food loss must be taken into account if we want to make dietary choices enhancing global food security," Milo says.

 

Prof. Ron Milo's research is supported by the Mary and Tom Beck -- Canadian Center for Alternative Energy Research, which he heads; the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program; Dana and Yossie Hollander; and the Larson Charitable Foundation. Prof. Milo is the incumbent of the Charles and Louise Gartner Professorial Chair.

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is one of the world's top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions. Noted for its wide-ranging exploration of the natural and exact sciences, the Institute is home to scientists, students, technicians and supporting staff. Institute research efforts include the search for new ways of fighting disease and hunger, examining leading questions in mathematics and computer science, probing the physics of matter and the universe, creating novel materials and developing new strategies for protecting the environment.

 

Source:

Weizmann Institute of Science