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.

 

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Weizmann Institute of Science

 

 

Whole eggs better for muscle building and repair than egg whites

People who consume 18 grams of protein from whole eggs or from egg whites after engaging in resistance exercise differ dramatically in how their muscles build protein, a process called protein synthesis, during the post-workout period, researchers report in a new study. Specifically, the post-workout muscle-building response in those eating whole eggs is 40 percent greater than in those consuming an equivalent amount of protein from egg whites, the team found.

The discovery, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests that the widespread practice of throwing away egg yolks to maximize one's dietary protein intake from eggs is counterproductive, said Nicholas Burd, a University of Illinois professor of kinesiology and community health who led the research.

The yolks also contain protein, along with key nutrients and other food components that are not present in egg whites, Burd said. And something in the yolks is boosting the body's ability to utilize that protein in the muscles.

"This study suggests that eating protein within its most natural food matrix tends to be more beneficial to our muscles as opposed to getting one's protein from isolated protein sources," he said.

In the study, 10 young men engaged in a single bout of resistance exercise and then ate either whole eggs or egg whites containing 18 grams of protein. Researchers administered infusions of stable-isotope-labeled leucine and phenylalanine (two important amino acids) to participants. This allowed the scientists to maintain and precisely measure amino acid levels in participants' blood and muscles.

The U. of I. Poultry Research Farm developed eggs for the study that also were isotopically labeled with leucine. This allowed for precise tracking of where the food-derived amino acids ended up after participants ingested them.

The team took repeated blood and muscle biopsy samples to assess how the egg-derived amino acids were appearing in the blood and in protein synthesis in muscles before and after the resistance exercise and eating.

"By using those labeled eggs, we saw that if you ate the whole egg or the egg whites, the same amount of dietary amino acids became available in your blood," Burd said. "In each case, about 60 to 70 percent of the amino acids were available in the blood to build new muscle protein. That would suggest that getting one's protein from whole eggs or just from the whites makes no difference, as the amount of dietary amino acids in the blood after eating generally gives us an indication of how potent a food source is for the muscle-building response."

But when the researchers directly measured protein synthesis in the muscle, they found a very different response.

"We saw that the ingestion of whole eggs immediately after resistance exercise resulted in greater muscle-protein synthesis than the ingestion of egg whites," Burd said.

Previous studies suggest this difference has nothing to do with the difference in energy content of whole eggs and egg whites -- whole eggs containing 18 grams of protein also contain about 17 grams of fat, whereas egg whites have no fat. Studies from Burd's lab and others show that simply adding fat to an isolated protein source in the diet after exercise does not boost protein synthesis.

"There's a lot of stress on protein nutrition in modern society, and research is showing that we need more protein in the diet than we once thought to maintain health," Burd said. "As world population grows, we need cost-effective and sustainable strategies for improving the use of protein in the diet. This work is showing that consuming egg protein in its natural matrix has a much greater benefit than getting isolated protein from the same source."