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Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Skipping Meals, Joining Gangs: How Teens Cope Without Enough Food At Home


Many kids rely on school for food their families can't afford. Two reports suggest one group is falling through the cracks: teens. Dogged by hunger, teens may try a wide range of strategies to get by.  

 


When Lanarion Norwood Jr. was 9 years old, he opened his family's refrigerator to find it almost empty. His grandmother, unemployed because of disability, had run out of food for the month. So Norwood did what many young children adamantly resist: He went to bed early. Sleeping, he reasoned, would help him suppress hunger, and he knew the next day he could eat at his Atlanta school.

That memory is one of Norwood's earliest recollections of being hungry, but not his last. As a teenager, his food concerns grew with his appetite. "I would plan out my meal[s]," Norwood says, now a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta. "I knew I could eat breakfast and lunch at school and I could eat again later at [an afterschool mentoring program]."

Number Of Hungry U.S. Kids Drops To Lowest Level Since Before Great Recession

  
Lots of kids like Norwood rely on schools for food their families can't afford. Federal programs like the National School Lunch Program offer free or discounted meals to children from low-income families. But two reports out this month from the Urban Institute and Feeding America suggest one group is falling through the cracks: teenagers. Roughly 7 million children in the U.S. aged 10-17 struggle with hunger, according to one report, which examines teenage access to food. Dogged by hunger, teenagers may try a wide range of solutions, from asking friends for meals to bartering sex for food.

 

To learn about teen hunger, the researchers partnered with food banks and, with funding from Conagra, conducted 20 focus groups across the country with adolescents from low-income families. The researchers found two challenges to feeding teens in need: First, some of the charitable programs that target young children — like backpack programs that allow kids to take food home over the weekend — aren't always offered to teenagers. And second, even when programs are available, teenagers feel more self-conscious about accepting free food or may not realize that they are eligible for the assistance.
 

  

Lead researcher Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute explains why the challenges facing teenagers are unique: "It's easier to get to little kids. They're all in school. They're certainly more cooperative. Teens are often seen as the problem. Not as part of the solution."

 

Teens, Popkin explains, are more aware of the stigma associated with a free lunch than younger children. They're also at an age where fitting in is paramount. So many teens will forego official programs and try to get meals from other places – by going to a friend's house with a well-stocked pantry, for example.

Norwood says pride is a major hurdle. "Why should I have to go through a program just to eat when I'm almost grown?" he says, describing the attitude of some of his peers.

Even adolescents who do opt to take advantage of school programs may not get a good meal, according to Popkin, because they often receive the same portion sizes as elementary school children. What's more, teens often squirrel the meal away for younger siblings.  

"They feel the pressure that their parents are under," she says. "They're old enough to be aware of it and they want to help. They go hungry along with their parents."

Teenagers cope with hunger in other ways too, the researchers found. Teenagers try to get jobs, but often struggle against the competition of adults with more experience and more flexible hours. The jobs they can get — like cutting hair or mowing grass — often don't pay well enough to bridge the gap in the family's food budget.

Sometimes teenagers turn to less benign methods to get money or food. Teenagers in the focus groups cited petty theft and even gang membership as methods adolescents used to put money and food on the table.

Most surprising to Popkin was that some teenagers, girls in particular, date older men with more disposable money in order to get food. Thirteen of the 20 focus groups talked about trading sex for a meal.

The SNAP Gap: Benefits Aren't Enough To Keep Many Recipients Fed  
  


What can be done to improve the plight of food-insecure teenagers? Popkin says simply extending elementary meal programs to teenagers could be a start, as well as increasing portions with age.

Emily Engelhard, managing director of research and evaluation for Feeding America, says teens came up with other ideas as well, like tying free food to another less stigmatized activity – like movie night or a basketball game. She says an important takeaway from the research is "just how incredible and resilient these teens are."

Better and more accessible grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods would also help, says Norwood. He says many people in Atlanta have to take a bus or train to reach a grocery store with fresh produce and can't afford the time or fare, to say nothing of lugging the groceries home.

He sums up the importance of teen hunger simply: "It is real. It is serious. And it should be addressed. It affects the mind, it affects the body, and it affects the soul. Without that, what do you have?"
 
By:Natalie Jacewicz

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

'five-second rule': Eating food off the floor isn't safe






Rutgers researchers have disproven the widely accepted notion that it's OK to scoop up food and eat it within a "safe" five-second window. Donald Schaffner, professor and extension specialist in food science, found that moisture, type of surface and contact time all contribute to cross-contamination. In some instances, the transfer begins in less than one second. Their findings appear online in the American Society for Microbiology's journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology.


"The popular notion of the 'five-second rule' is that food dropped on the floor, but picked up quickly, is safe to eat because bacteria need time to transfer," Schaffner said, adding that while the pop culture "rule" has been featured by at least two TV programs, research in peer-reviewed journals is limited.

"We decided to look into this because the practice is so widespread. The topic might appear 'light' but we wanted our results backed by solid science," said Schaffner, who conducted research with Robyn Miranda, a graduate student in his laboratory at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

The researchers tested four surfaces -- stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood and carpet -- and four different foods (watermelon, bread, bread and butter, and gummy candy). They also looked at four different contact times -- less than one second, five, 30 and 300 seconds. They used two media -- tryptic soy broth or peptone buffer -- to grow Enterobacter aerogenes, a nonpathogenic "cousin" of Salmonella naturally occurring in the human digestive system.

Transfer scenarios were evaluated for each surface type, food type, contact time and bacterial prep; surfaces were inoculated with bacteria and allowed to completely dry before food samples were dropped and left to remain for specified periods. All totaled 128 scenarios were replicated 20 times each, yielding 2,560 measurements. Post-transfer surface and food samples were analyzed for contamination.

Not surprisingly, watermelon had the most contamination, gummy candy the least. "Transfer of bacteria from surfaces to food appears to be affected most by moisture," Schaffner said. "Bacteria don't have legs, they move with the moisture, and the wetter the food, the higher the risk of transfer. Also, longer food contact times usually result in the transfer of more bacteria from each surface to food."

Perhaps unexpectedly, carpet has very low transfer rates compared with those of tile and stainless steel, whereas transfer from wood is more variable. "The topography of the surface and food seem to play an important role in bacterial transfer," Schaffner said.


So while the researchers demonstrate that the five-second rule is "real" in the sense that longer contact time results in more bacterial transfer, it also shows other factors, including the nature of the food and the surface it falls on, are of equal or greater importance.

"The five-second rule is a significant oversimplification of what actually happens when bacteria transfer from a surface to food," Schaffner said. "Bacteria can contaminate instantaneously."

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Rutgers University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

11 Foods That Kill Your Sex Drive

Food and sex have had a complicated relationship over the years, almost as complicated as your own love life. Taking someone out to dinner is a fail-safe date, and making dinner at your own place is that much more impressive. There are even foods meant to boost your libido, like shellfish and avocados.

But, as with every relationship, food and sex have their disagreements, too.

Yep, there are foods that do a pretty good job of turning you and your partner off, rather than on. And if that's not really the mood you're looking to set for your big date Saturday night, then you'll want to avoid eating these 11 foods that will kill your sex drive.


CHEESE




While cheese platters might be a classy way to impress your date, they're also a one-way ticket to abstinence-ville. Population: You. The multitudes of hormones in dairy products, like cheese, might mess with your hormone levels, including estrogen and testosterone.

And when your hormones are askew, it's likely that your sex drive won't be at its strongest.



MINT



Skip the pre-kiss gum, guys; the menthol in mint lowers testosterone, which in turn depletes your sex drive. Try a fruitier flavor to keep your breath and your libido fresh.







CORNFLAKES



Good advice for that early breakfast date? (Hey, there are weirder things.) If you and your date are meeting in the morning (or maybe you're still together from the night before...) skip this bland breakfast cereal. Otherwise, you'll have a much less enjoyable, uh, morning grind.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who invented corn flakes, believed that sweet or spicy foods inflamed the passions, and sought to depress the libido with a bland, sugarless cereal. The reasoning behind his diabolical experiment is unknown. However, it's unlikely that Kellogg created a cereal so bland that it makes sex unappealing; more likely, it's the carbs and grains in this cereal that kill your drive.



COFFEE



Planning on, uh, pulling an all-nighter? Not with coffee, you're not. If coffee makes you jittery, then you should not be drinking it before having sex. Your increased anxiety from the caffeine intake will lower your sex drive, as people with caffeine sensitivity have most likely experiences.



CHOCOLATE


This one might seem surprising, considering that chocolate has been well-known as an aphrodisiac for years. While this may hold true for women, men are singing a different tune when it comes to chocolate and sex; chocolate actually lowers testosterone levels, lowering male sex drive dramatically.

Sorry dudes, leave the boxes of chocolate to the ladies.



MICROWAVABLE POPCORN


Having your date over to Netflix and chill? Skip the microwavable popcorn. Definitely for the sake of your sex drive, but also for some more serious health reasons. Chemicals like perfluorooctanoic acid found in the bag’s lining can not only kill your libido, but over the long term even cause prostate problems in men.

Switch to stove top corn, fellas. Still romantic and delicious, minus the unpronounceable chemical that's slowly killing your prostate.


SOY



This one isn't all bad — for women, at least. Soy has high levels of estrogen, which means that ingesting soy products prior to sex will boost a woman's libido significantly.

However, for men, the opposite can be said. Eating soy boosts a man's estrogen levels, doing a pretty good job of ending his sex drive pretty much on the spot.



FRIED FOOD


We'd like to think that Mickey D's is not your go-to dinner date spot. If, for whatever reason, it is, you're essentially sabotaging your love life. Fried foods and foods that are high in fat (which, yes, means fast food in most cases) leave you feeling tired and sluggish. Shockingly, that's not very sexy.

Even worse, hydrogenated fats and oils suppress male testosterone levels. That double whammy is not worth that double cheeseburger.


ALCOHOL



While bars may be a prime place for meeting people, they're also a prime place for embarrassing sexual encounters. Of the limp kind. Sure, that last tequila shot gave you the confidence to ask someone to come home with you, but it will also reduce testosterone levels and limit sexual function in both men and women.

LICORICE 


Skip this snack at your next movie date. Due to a natural ingredient in the candy called glycyrrhizin, eating a high amount of licorice can suppress your libido and lower testosterone levels. Granted, you would have to eat a lot of licorice for this to be a serious issue — but do you really want to risk it?

DIET SODA




At this point, we all know that drinking diet soda is almost worse than drinking regular sodas. Staying fit and trim is usually good for your sex drive, but eating and drinking products with artificial sweeteners, especially aspartame, directly affect your serotonin levels, a vital hormone for the libido in both men or women.



Source:TESSA NEWELL